Aiding and Abetting
by JolieBlack
Summary: When Greg Lestrade meets Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant young detective seems to have left his past as a drug addict far behind. But when one of their cases pitches Sherlock headlong into a relapse, Greg is determined not to lose him – whatever the cost to himself. - A canon-compliant piece of backstory, set pre-series.
1. Chapter 1

He erupts into my life on a sunny afternoon in early May.

I have a slight cold. I've had fish and chips for lunch with MacDee. And if I were a woman, I'd probably always remember what I'm wearing.

_He_ wears a long dark coat. Far too warm for the day. He's odd in other ways, too. 

On the campus of the Imperial College, Faculty of Medicine, I'm waiting in the corridor outside a dead professor's office. The door is closed and still taped off, and behind it, there is a mystery.

Professor Thomas Ellerton, a renowned cancer specialist in his late sixties, was found here yesterday morning by a cleaner, dangling from the lamp hook in the middle of his spacious office. Since then, we've gone over the room with a fine tooth comb - hours and hours of work, since it's in complete chaos. Someone has pulled all the books and folders and journals off the shelves. The floor is strewn with papers. His laptop is gone, too. Suicide, most of us would have said, if it hadn't been for the mess. And, more importantly, if it hadn't been for the utter lack of any object that he could have stood on when he put his neck in the noose. For a space of five feet all around that hook, there is a jumble of scientific publications on the floor, but no evidence of how he could have got up far enough off the ground to take the jump that killed him.

That is the reason why I'm back here today, waiting for the widow and her solicitor to arrive, and the private investigator that she insisted on involving in this. It's not as if she doubts our competence, the solicitor assures me on the phone when we make the appointment. But she's shaken to the core by her husband's death, and she feels that she owes it to him to leave no stone unturned to find out what exactly happened to him. I assure the lawyer in my turn that that's exactly what we will do, and that that's what _we_ do best. But he isn't listening. He's probably the type who never does.

I relent, then. Half an hour in that office can't be too much of a waste of time. MacDee and I were going to go back there today anyway, in the hope of a brainwave. And by all means let them bring this private detective with them. Either he's a former colleague, as so many of them are, so he might even have something interesting to say. Or if he's annoying, I'll just throw him out, this being a crime scene and all. It's not like these guys don't know that they're on shaky ground at best when they try to compete with us. Not just in terms of their legal standing, but even more so in terms of expertise.

I've never been so wrong in my life.

I try to form a preliminary opinion of him when he comes walking - striding - down the corridor towards me, ahead - yes, ahead - of his client and her solicitor. Not a former colleague, definitely not, if only because there is not and has never been a man in the entire Metropolitan Police Service with that amount of dress sense. He's too young, too.

"Sherlock Holmes," he greets me, offering his hand. "We've met before."

No, we haven't. But then, that's what private investigators have to do when they get involved in a case from our domain. They depend on our goodwill, so currying favour by making friendly small-talk is part of the game. I can't blame him for trying.

If this is small-talk though, it ends here, and rather abruptly, too.

"You done in there?" he asks, pointing at the door to the dead man's office.

"Yes," I say, and he walks over and raises his hand as if to remove the tape. "I mean no," I correct myself quickly. "The forensic team's been and gone, but it's not been officially cleared yet."

He raises his eyebrows, and briefly, I wonder how he manages to make me feel that_ I'm _the idiot here who's wasting a professional's valuable time.

"I sincerely hope that it hasn't been_ cleared_ yet," he replies. "Or how am I supposed to still find anything useful in there?"

And without so much as a by-your-leave, he does pluck off the tape, opens the door and steps in.

This is irregular, of course it is. But we actually are done here. The formal clearance is all that's missing. It's not like we're still expecting anything new to be gathered from the room as such, so preserving the crime scene uncontaminated in order to make any evidence admissible in court is no longer an issue. Not worth making a fuss about, particularly not if it helps the poor woman to some peace of mind. 

Two or three steps inside the open door, Sherlock Holmes immediately raises his eyes to the hook in the ceiling, then turns back to me. "Where's the rope?" he snaps, and all but snaps his fingers as well in impatience.

"Removed, of course," I reply, irritated. "It's evidence."

And therefore already on its way to the lab, for traces of blood, DNA, or anything else that might tell us whether Professor Ellerton died a lonely death or not.

"Precisely, that's what it is," he replies. "So how do you hope to reconstruct events with any kind of accuracy if you take a natural entity apart like that?"

Next thing, he'll be complaining that we've taken the body to the morgue, too.

"Right, tell me what_ your_ theory is," he changes tack with dizzying speed, glancing around the room with those curiously pale eyes of his. Disquieting eyes. Cat's eyes, but for the slit pupils.

"Let me guess," he continues when I don't reply straight away. "You're currently inclined towards suicide, but you're baffled by the lack of any kind of physical support that the man might have stood on. Besides, the widow's statement that she made to your sergeant yesterday, in which she informed you that her husband was not mentally unstable, except for the occasional, probably age-related bout of absent-mindedness, makes her idea that this death might have been an act of revenge by a disaffected former member of his staff quite plausible, doesn't it?"

I haven't got past the first few words by the time he finishes that sentence. And he hasn't even drawn a single breath in between, as far as I can tell. 

"Something like that, yeah," I manage to get out, and he smiles. Not a friendly smile though.

Yesterday, the widow lost no time telling my sergeant - Alec Macdonald, universally known in the force as MacDee - all about this man who was formerly an assistant of Professor Ellerton's. He was, by all appearances, himself destined for a brilliant career in cancer research. Until he got a little impatient and started fiddling with his test results to make them comply with his more spectacular theories. Professor Ellerton, when he found out, sacked him at once.

But the man now works in a private clinic in Portugal. As far as a first enquiry with our Portuguese colleagues could establish, he was present there at the time of the tragedy yesterday morning. Besides, that incident happened ten years ago. Would even such a humiliation still have rankled after all that time? And so badly that it would make a man embark on this kind of vendetta? Pull a fragile old gentleman up in a noose, and then go on to wreck his office, as if the killer wasn't only keen on destroying the man himself, but also, symbolically, his work?

There is something particularly ironic in that last idea, because the medical record that we got from Professor Ellerton's GP this morning states that he had, sadly, been recently diagnosed with incipient Alzheimer's disease. So not too long down the road, he would no longer have been able to impress anyone with his mental abilities anyway.

But the widow seems to have really got her teeth into the idea that this failed scientist must have had a hand in her husband's death. She even insists that her husband mentioned this unpleasant episode several times in the week before his death. If it was on his mind, she is convinced, it's a reasonable assumption that it was about to catch up with him.

"How high off the ground was the body when it was found?" Sherlock Holmes breaks into my thoughts.

"About a foot and a half. Not very high."

He rolls his eyes. "_How_ high?" he repeats.

I sigh, and take out the case file from under my arm. "Seventeen inches," I inform him when I've found the relevant data in the reports.

A moment later, I realise that I've just given a private citizen, a casual bystander, a piece of confidential information out of the police file of an ongoing investigation. And I didn't even notice that that's what I was doing. How does _he_ do that?

And what's he doing now? He's walked a few more steps into the room, squats down and starts to gather up the papers and books and journals that lie strewn all over the floor under the lamp hook.

This time, I don't only realise immediately that something's going wrong here. I also protest.

"Do you want this matter cleared up, or don't you?" he replies, not even looking at me.

I'm about to ask him why he thinks he's the man to do that, but then I admit that curiosity gets the better of me. He's clearly got some particular end in view, so I settle down to watch him, reminding myself that we _were_ done here. He works methodically, with quick but very assured movements, outward from the centre, in widening circles, glancing at each of the documents as he picks them up, discarding some but collecting most of them.

When he's reached the outer perimeter of five feet in every direction - the same space where we failed to find anything that Professor Ellerton could have jumped from - the floor is almost clear. The papers he has gathered amount to an impressive stack. He gives it a pat with his hand and looks up at us from his place on the floor with an expression of great satisfaction.

"The academic achievement of a lifetime," he announces. "Every article, every scientific paper, every monograph he's ever published. The epitome and summary of everything he lived for."

I, the widow and her solicitor look back at him, utterly at a loss what he might be getting at.

He smiles again, and again it's not a friendly smile. "Oh, of course you wouldn't see it," he scoffs. "You people never see the wood for the trees, do you? Well, this is the wood."

He picks the whole stack up with both hands, places it right in the centre of the room, directly under the lamp hook, and squares and straightens it into a neat, solid block. Then he digs a measuring tape out of the pocket of his coat, takes a measurement, gets to his feet and holds the measuring tape up in display for us three to see, stretched out between both hands. The index finger of his left hand marks the height of the paper stack. Seventeen inches exactly.

With a click, the tape disappears back into its casing, and Sherlock Holmes turns to address the thunderstruck widow.

"Sorry to disappoint you, Mrs Ellerton," he says in a tone that doesn't express the slightest sympathy. "It was definitely suicide. So since you asked for my advice, I would advise you now to abandon the theory of murder at once. Unless you insist on turning this into a case of attempted insurance fraud, with yourself as the prime suspect."

The widow stares at him, aghast.

"But if, as I assume, you were unaware of your husband's intentions, you may take comfort from two facts," he continues generously. "The first is that your late husband was obviously fond enough of you to make sure that you were not left in a financially precarious situation after his death. Even if _you_ were not, _he_ was clearly aware of the clause in his insurance policy that excludes any payments to you or the children in the case of suicide. Or why else would he do his best to make this appear like murder? From the recent mentions of his disaffected former assistant and the ravaging of his office to this very, very clever concealment of how he managed to jump to his death, this wasn't just the work of a highly intelligent man, but also an act of kindness."

He turns to me then. "If I were you, I'd take a very careful look at his medical records. Any kind of fatal disease, or any incurable, mentally incapacitating condition would do as a motive." He jerks his chin at the at the stack of papers. "Considering that message, my money would be on the latter."

"What's the second fact?" the solicitor asks rather stupidly after a moment of dumbfounded silence.

"Oh, just look at it!" Sherlock Holmes exclaims impatiently, with a grand gesture at that fateful collection of documents. "He had _style!_"

And the widow breaks into tears. 

#

"You look odd, Greg," MacDee remarks when I return to the office. "Anything wrong?"

I slump down in my chair. "Do you ever get the feeling, MacDee, that we've all missed our calling? All of us?"

He looks amused. "Not really. Well, one or two, maybe. Dimmock, definitely, now that you mention it." His friendly, open face looks ready to break into a full grin, but when he sees nothing of that kind on mine, he becomes serious again. "What is it?"

"It's just that I've always thought we were quite good at putting two and two together," I say. "But I've just seen someone solve a quadratic equation without a pocket calculator or even pen and paper, if you know what I mean. The kind with three unknowns, too."

MacDee raises his eyebrows, looking impressed. Then he grins after all. "Whoever he is, hire him."

And so it begins.

#


	2. Chapter 2

**CHAPTER NOTE:** A more detailed account of how Greg met Sherlock for the very first time, without realising it, is given in "The Trapping of Birdy Edwards". But you don't need to read that story first for this one to make sense.

* * *

Corruption is the bane of every police force in the world, and it comes in many forms. The crudest kind – favours for money – is by far the most common, but not the only one. Any unofficial arrangement that violates laws and bypasses the rules of procedure qualifies, and it isn't justified just because both sides benefit by it.

Or so I think, before I meet Sherlock Holmes. But until then, I like to think, too, that I'm fairly immune to that kind of temptation anyway.

Over the weeks that follow our first meeting at the Imperial College, I quickly reassess my set of beliefs on both counts.

Of course, what we embark on then is completely illegal and irregular. If anyone had told me that I'd ever tolerate an off-the-record understanding like the one that develops between Sherlock Holmes and me, I'd have laughed. And if anyone had told me that I'd actually be the one who started and actively encouraged it, I'd have told them to go to hell.

But imagine for a moment that you're a police officer who cares even halfway about doing a decent job. Then imagine you're chasing some bastard who's got on the wrong side of the law really badly, and he's a long way ahead of you in his car, and all you have to chase him with is a rickety bicycle. If at this moment, some guy came along and offered you to borrow his Maserati, would you say no? Even if the guy insisted on driving himself, and relegated you to the passenger seat? And even if he jumped every red light and broke every speed limit and generally made himself a terrible nuisance to all his fellow road users on the way?

You wouldn't think of yourself as corrupt. You'd swallow your pride, and you'd play along. And the next time you were after someone who's about to get away with impunity, you'd call in the guy with the Maserati of your own accord. And you wouldn't give a damn about how exactly he fits into the system that you're part of and that it's your duty to uphold.

Besides, working with Sherlock Holmes is the most fascinating experience I've ever had in my professional life.

We see him do extraordinary things. It's like his senses – all of them – have been sharpened to the power of ten, compared with the rest of us, and his capacities for storing, processing and re-accessing anything that they perceive are unlimited. What we get to see leaves us gaping and shaking our heads in amazement, and even that can only be a tiny glimpse into a brain that must be unequalled in this country, if not in the whole world.

And it's not just what he's got filed away in his brain, and how he connects seemingly unconnected things. He also impresses us in other ways.

I see him make short work of a suspect who tries to evade arrest, and makes the mistake to pick the posh bloke in the smart suit as the least likely candidate to offer resistance. That poor devil has never been more wrong in his life either.

I also see him scale up the side of a building – in the same smart suit - and make his way into it through a first floor bathroom window that should have been too narrow to admit even a half-grown teenager.

And I watch him play mind games. The most impressive one in these early days is with a middle-aged lady whom he coaxes, cajoles, _seduces, _by no other means than his voice,into confessing to the murder of her husband. In the end, he's even made her feel grateful to him for giving her the chance to unburden herself. He scares me in those moments, and I make a silent prayer each time that I'll never find myself on the receiving end of one of those stunts. This is one of his many talents that I'll never be entirely comfortable with, no matter how useful it can be.

But that's exactly the point - he gets us there.

He's rude, but he's brilliant. He drives us potty, but he works things out, ten times faster than we could, and he earns our team commendations from the Chief Superintendent that we don't deserve but eagerly accept none the less. At least the younger ones of us do, those who still have a long and stony road ahead of them through the ranks of the service.

You can't like him, but he very quickly makes you feel like you can't do without him.

"It's a bit like the unhealthy kind of being in love," MacDee startles me by saying, one evening at the pub. "You know it's twisted and wrong and not good for you, but you can't let go."

I look at him in astonishment, because the MacDee that I know has firmly given his heart to a very sweet young hairdresser named Catriona from his native Aberdeen, and I could have sworn that he's never experienced the twisted and wrong kind of love in his life. He's happy with his Cat in a way that Judy and I never were.

Besides, I disagree. It's not like being in love, it's more like having an unruly child. One that keeps driving you up the wall, but is still so much a natural part of your life that you'd never consider to send him packing, even once he's old enough to fend for himself.

But then, I know as much about what it's like to have kids as MacDee knows about unhealthy love affairs.

The unanswered question of what exactly Sherlock's status is, or should be, when he's working for us quickly fades to the background. It's not like we've never consulted an outsider before. A lot of things can turn up in the work of a Criminal Investigation Department that none of us detectives, nor anyone on the forensics team, has the expertise to examine and analyse properly. There is even a budget for that sort of thing.

And who cares whether he is a technical specialist or not, when we don't even have to tap that budget to pay him. He _is_ a specialist - just in the same field that the Chief Superintendent likes to refer to as our own 'core competence'.

Money, for some reason, has never been an issue with Sherlock Holmes anyway. The first time I bring that question up - in a quiet moment in my office, just back from the scene of a fatal hit-and-run case, with the perpetrator identified and as good as arrested already - he waves it aside.

"Consider it an apprenticeship agreement," he says, "with the objective of gathering knowledge and skills, not of making money."

"You mean you're my apprentice?" I ask, surprised but intrigued at the notion.

"No, you're mine," he replies, and grins the sort of grin that makes me want to slap him around the face with the file I'm still holding in my hand.

#

Persuading my colleagues to cooperate with him proves the bigger problem. The urge to slap him around the face arises on a fairly regular basis, and it's an almost universal phenomenon.

It's fine with MacDee. MacDee is just as fascinated by his abilities as I am. And for some reason, Sherlock doesn't seem to get annoyed with him, at least not as easily as with anyone else. He treats MacDee like a pet, I sometimes think, to be tolerated as part of the family, and sometimes even acknowledged with a little pat on the head. Sherlock can listen to him presenting a case or expounding a theory for more than two minutes running without interrupting him impatiently. It makes MacDee glow with pride; I suspect it's only because Sherlock finds MacDee's heavy Scottish accent funny. But of course I don't have the heart to tell him that.

With the others, it's not so easy. It would be, of course, if Sherlock was just a little more conformable to the standards of common courtesy, and showed just a little more consideration for his fellow human beings, and a little more patience with their shortcomings. But he has no time for that when he flies through our offices and crime scenes, a stormy petrel in a long dark coat. As a rule, he leaves us behind on the ground with our feathers thoroughly ruffled.

For a while, I try to figure out what exactly it is that allows – or compels - him to bypass most of the social rules that we ordinary mortals feel bound by. Is it something he can't help, or does he just not care?

There is no point in trying to settle on either/or. It's clearly both. He can slip into almost any role he likes when he's dealing with clients, victims, witnesses and suspects. He can put on whatever mask suits his purpose best, with practised ease. That is _all_ intent. But on the other hand, he wastes so much time and energy on his pointless little - and not so little - skirmishes with people of lesser intelligence and greater decency. I doubt that he could come up with a rational reason for doing what he does then.

#

The first and fiercest enemy that he makes at the Met is Sally Donovan, who is a sergeant in the Sexual Offences, Exploitation and Child Abuse Unit, and a woman who takes no nonsense from anyone.

I fool myself into thinking that she and Sherlock might actually get along well, seeing how similar they are in some ways. They're both very dedicated, very thorough, and very good at digging in their heels when they're convinced that they're on the right track and you're not. But they're like oil and water, right from the beginning. Maybe _because_ they're both dedicated, thorough and good at telling other people they're wrong.

I can hear their raised voices echoing down the main staircase of the hospital as I'm ascending it, and when I turn the corner into the long corridor of the paediatric A&amp;E, the full blast of their argument hits me in the face like a heatwave. Sally is flushed with anger and Sherlock is pale with it, but they're definitely equally loud.

"Nobody in their right mind would ask them to relive that nightmare right now!" she shouts.

Of course, it does seem a bit early to ask two traumatised teenage boys to go into detail about the three men who kept them in a dark cellar for days on end, doing unspeakable things to them and recording it all on camera. They've only just been brought in, one of them haemorrhaging so badly that he got checked straight into an OT. Which is the reason why I'm here, too. Because what they did to that one was attempted homicide alright. But it is also a fact that only two of the bastards are in custody yet. The third gave us the slip, and there's very little to go on to identify him. At least very little that doesn't take days to come back from the lab, days that we don't have. And much as I and MacDee may regret it in cases like these, tying the other two to their chairs in the interrogation room and beating the living daylights out of them until they rat on their crony isn't regular police procedure. Which is the reason why Sherlock is here. Not that putting his brain to the problem is more regular than putting our fists to it would be. But it's easier to hush up.

"And if you knew the first thing about the destructive influence of raised cortisol levels in the hippocampus on the encoding of long-term memories," he yells back at Sally now, "you'd know that every minute is of value if we want to get anything useful out of them!"

"They're children, you idiot, and they've just been rescued from hell, what do you think they care about the whatever levels in their bloody - "

"Yeah, and what do you care about getting your hands on the third one? You on their payroll or something, since you seem so keen on covering up for them?"

"You a perv or something, who gets off on hearing all the filthy details?"

I hurry to separate them without any actual bloodshed, but Sherlock has already turned on his heel and is striding towards me and the exit. Sally, with her arms folded across her chest, glares after him.

"She's wrong," Sherlock snaps as he sweeps past me. "She's completely wrong." And with that, he departs.

Three days later, the doctors finally agree on a first careful attempt to question the boys with the assistance of a specially trained child psychologist. And the older of them gives us a frankly mind-boggling amount of details to identify the third man, down to the tattoos on his arms and the scars on his fingers.

It takes us no more than an hour of research to fit a name, a face, and even a record of previous convictions of a similar kind to the description. Another hour of research establishes that he left the country on a flight to Cambodia the day before yesterday. We curse, and pass the files on to Interpol.

In the evening, the hospital calls to say that the boy we talked to tried to jump out of a window after we left.

Sometimes, the lines between right and wrong aren't as clear cut as both Sally Donovan and Sherlock Holmes would like to believe. But _does_ that make one of them right, and the other wrong? And if yes, which one's which?

All I'm sure of is that they both have something to give to the Metropolitan Police Service, and to our city as a whole. And they should both continue to do so, even though they will never be friends.

#

Philip Anderson, from Forensic Services, is another of my colleagues who doesn't take kindly to the sort of ruffling that Sherlock provides on a regular basis.

There is really nothing wrong with Philip. He's a very conscientious worker, always careful and correct in how he handles evidence. Maybe he's a little too prone to overstepping the actual bounds of his competence. He likes to think aloud about the cases he works on, and not just about the forensic aspects. He enjoys coming up with theories – sometimes rather odd theories – and will insist on discussing them even when there's very little evidence to support them. MacDee and I are used to turning a deaf ear when it gets too silly. But Sherlock hits the roof, every time.

The first time they clash isn't about theorising ahead of data though. It's about another cardinal sin in criminal investigation, and to be fair, this time Sherlock is the culprit.

The case looks like a break-in turned ugly. While the victim - an elderly lady living alone - has to be rushed off in an ambulance with a suspected heart attack on top of the battering she received, Anderson and his assistants are busy sifting through her ravaged living room for fingerprints and DNA traces when Sherlock arrives. This isn't even one of the desperate cases; it's just the sort of puzzle that he seems fond of, and at this point I'm still trying to figure out just what it is he does best. Admittedly, I'm also trying to work out what his limits are.

"Good one," he greets me as he comes striding in. "Break-in scenario on the inside, but no traces of a break-in on the outside?"

He walks right through the bloodstains on the carpet and comes to a halt in the middle of the living room. Anderson and his colleagues exchange an appalled look. Ignoring them completely, Sherlock spins on his heel in a three hundred and sixty degrees turn, taking in the chaos that the burglars have left behind them with a single glance. Then he walks over to take a look at the family photographs in their silver frames on the mantelpiece. He picks up one of those, carries it over to the dining table – right through the bloodstains again - and brushes the contents of an upturned drawer aside to make room. Anderson inhales sharply in indignation, and I agree. This needs to stop. We're generous to let him in here at all at this early point in time. He really can't wreck the evidence, not when we've barely started securing it.

"I really don't – " I begin, but Sherlock simply puts the picture up in display and points, with his scandalously ungloved hand, at the oldest of the three - grandchildren, probably. It's a young man, just out of adolescence, with a pale face, slightly overgrown hair and a weak grin in place of the radiant smile that his two - younger sisters, probably - present to the camera.

"That's the one you're looking for," Sherlock declares. "Drug addict. Desperate for money. Probably never dreamed that the old lady would turn him down, then lost it and had a go at her. Tried to make it look like an outside job afterwards." He jerks his head at the spatters of blood on the floor, and the several pieces of paper that seem to have fluttered down from the table. "Or why else would those papers lie on _top_ of the blood? Unless you or one of those duffers that you're in charge of controlling swept them down there yourselves when you came in?" He looks around at Anderson and his colleagues with a curl of his lip. "Now the only mystery that remains is what _they're_ doing here at all." He pulls a face at them. "Might as well pack up and call it a day, boys."

"And _you_ can go downstairs now," Anderson bursts out, "and report yourself to the constable on duty for a full ID procedure. I want your fingerprints, all ten of them, and a DNA sample, before I even think of looking for anyone else's."

"Don't be stupid, you've already got those," Sherlock snaps back. "And as even _you _might be aware, neither tends to change very much over the years." And he makes a magnificent exit, coat tails swishing, before Philip can close his mouth again.

"He's on something," he mutters when Sherlock is out of earshot. "He's definitely on something."

I can see what he means, but I'm not buying it. "Yes," I tell him, "he's on the case. That's all."

All the same, Philip Anderson has managed to plant a little nagging doubt in my mind. In the quiet of the night, my thoughts go back to the way Sherlock dances through our crime scenes, to the speed at which he talks when he's onto something and can't wait to relay it to the rest of the world, and to the almost absurd level of energy that he brings to practically everything he does - nothing without an extra flourish. Is it so strange to assume that there's a chemical aspect involved there?

#

The next morning, in my office, I look him up in the database, wondering why I haven't thought to do that much earlier. And the penny finally drops. He was right after all - of course I've met him before. Under a different name; eighteen months, a thousand other faces and one promotion ago.

The five instances documented in the database are all of a later date than that first time, but the topic never changes. Possession, every time. Small quantities for personal use only, most of the times. The last time, a considerable quantity. Remanded in custody for eight days, then released on bail. Charges eventually dropped, every time. And for about a year now, nothing at all any more.

I pick up the phone and call the sergeant whose initials are at the bottom of most of the reports: Athelney Jones, in spite of his fanciful first name one of the most solidly grounded men that I know, straightforward and uncomplicated.

"I've got a question about someone."

"Spill it."

"Sherlock Holmes."

"Hang on." The sound of typing. "Yep, got him."

"Ever met him?"

"Once or twice, yeah. Weird, weird bloke."

"Casual user, would you say, or full-blown addict?"

"How many people d'you know who manage to use heroin casually?"

"Hasn't been in trouble for over a year though."

Athelney chuckles drily. "Make that no trouble that we know of."

"And what got him off the charges again, every time? Rich parents coughing up for a prime solicitor, or something?"

He would be the type.

"No idea. Ask my boss."

"Jones, the man who was your boss back then is retired, and probably cruising on his yacht in the Sargasso Sea right now."

"Yeah, true. Lucky bastard."

And there, for the time being, end my attempts at bridging a gap. On the one hand, there is the hollow-eyed wreck that I literally stumbled over in the corridor of a police station in North London, a year and a half ago. On the other, there is the well-groomed, self-assured and immensely competent young professional that I met only last month. How can they possibly be the same man?

But I should have remembered. Because the junkie from back then did solve us a murder, too. Some among his two dozen fellow smackheads in that same den had a go at some poor devil's head with a crowbar, not an hour before we showed up to shut the place down for good. And he was the one who pointed out to us which of them bore the unmistakable traces of the deed.

He had the monotonous, slurry voice and the dull, clouded eyes of a true addict then. And those nervous, twitchy looks over his shoulder told us plainly that he was either very anxious for his next fix, or very worried about what his cronies would have to say to him for turning snitch, next time he met them on his own in a dark alley. Or both. But all of that was so far from the Sherlock Holmes that I know that I'd never have made the connection, if Anderson hadn't literally rubbed my nose in it. I can't really make it even now. It doesn't add up. I don't understand it.

And of course, I never ask him about it.

Over the coming weeks, I catch myself watching him covertly for recent signs of that sort. I never see any. And as for Anderson's suspicions, it's the wrong substance anyway. No matter what it kids you into feeling like on the inside, I've never yet seen heroin make anyone glow on the outside, the way Sherlock does when he's working.

In time, I push it right to the back of my mind. Because whatever his flaws, and whatever his past, we come to rely on him, and he comes to rely on us. And he never lets us down. After about half a year in his company that passes almost like a dream, I have come to think of him as a man who cannot fail.

But of course that isn't compatible with another opinion of him that I have formed much earlier on – that he will never cease to surprise you. And thus it comes that one Sunday night in October, he surprises us all, himself included, by spectacularly failing to stop a triple murderer.

#


	3. Chapter 3

**CHAPTER NOTE:** A word of **WARNING.** This chapter contains a description of a truly horrific crime - based on a real case, too, sadly. The only reason why it's there is to illustrate what it can do to police officers and rescue workers to have to witness such things. I bow in respect and admiration to all those who do these jobs in real life.

* * *

It is one of those cases, to be honest, that are impossible to handle with success. It is the sort of case where all you can ever do is pick up the pieces. You compose your face into a mask of decorum until the shocked neighbours and the press have departed. And then you try and wash the memory of it away with a pint or four at the pub with your mates.

The downside of murder/suicides is that they are usually planned perfectly, long in advance, and carried out ruthlessly, by minds that function like a plane on autopilot once they have programmed themselves that way. They're practically unpreventable.

The upside of them – apart from the fact that they're rare - is that normally, nobody even realises what's going on until the damage is done anyway. Feelings of guilt are usually reserved for friends and family members. We professionals get to wash our hands of them very quickly. No previous criminal records, as a rule; no known history of mental illness _(known _always being the problem, of course); no indicators of an impending catastrophe; no leads that should have been followed up but weren't. Case closed.

But occasionally, you come on the scene before the damage is completed. And the upside of that is that, at least for a while, you get to think that there is actually something you can do to prevent it. The illusion never lasts, though, and then you still have to stand there and watch disaster unfold before your eyes, unable to lift a finger to stop it happening.

The one that happens in October is of this latter sort.

In hindsight, I should never have got Sherlock involved in it. And that _is_ my fault, because he wouldn't have got wind of it otherwise, at least not before it was too late anyway. Because when the frantic mother discovers the body of her disabled teenage son in her ex-husband's home, slumped in the special wheelchair that the boy depended on, his neck and torso covered in blood from a dozen stab wounds to his chest, one of the first things we make sure of is a complete news blackout. We can't take the risk of making the killer aware that we're on his trail, not as long as we haven't recovered the little twin girls who have gone missing from the same house. So I'm already violating every rule in the book – again – by texting Sherlock for help, barely ten minutes after we realise that the killer we're looking for must be the children's own father. Since there are no more bodies in the house, he must have taken his daughters away alive, after stabbing his son with one of his own kitchen knives. He was overdue in returning the kids to his ex-wife at the end of the weekend. He must have known that he would soon be found out. And now he's gone with the two remaining kids, God knows where. At this point, I think I may be forgiven for calling in Sherlock Holmes.

He comes, of course he does. On the doorstep of the house, he listens to the first thirty seconds of what I try to tell him about the case, waves me into silence, and takes another thirty seconds with his eyes on the muddy gravel of the driveway to tell us that the man and both girls left here in a Renault Clio not an hour ago. He leaves it to us to look up the details of the car and to start piecing together the data from the CCTV footage down at the main road. When it takes too long for his taste, he just walks away down the street into the gathering dusk. I have enough on my hands as it is, and barely notice his departure. Only a few minutes later, my phone buzzes a new text message. "Shell station. Order a sniffer dog and come down here. SH" I know better by now than to disregard any of that.

At the petrol station down by the main road, Sherlock stands waiting for us by the washing bay, his hands in the pocket of his coat. He points with his chin towards a large puddle of muddy water between the bay and the road, well out of the way from the petrol pumps. Clearly visible on the otherwise bone dry concrete paving, there are the tracks of car tyres leading away from the puddle in two directions, one into the washing bay, one back to the road. I don't waste any time asking him whether he's sure they could have been made by a Renault Clio. I do ask what he means to do with the dog.

"Smell anything?" he asks in return, and yes, now I do. It is the sharp, chemical odour of windscreen washer fluid that has somehow accumulated in that puddle, and that the car went through on its way out of the petrol station – the only car that did lately, according to the tracks.

"Toby's on his way", I tell him.

He glances at me, eyebrows raised. "Toby?"

"Wait and see. Better nose than you, even."

"I could do it myself, you know. But I'd look ridiculous, running along with my nose within inches of the ground."

He grins at me, and I grin back.

Another minute or two later, there is no more grinning. MacDee returns from the station shop where he's been fast-forwarding through the CCTV footage of the last hour, with the help of the young man from behind the till. And he bears the news that the man we're looking for parked his car in the washing bay forty-five minutes ago and got out to purchase a single item – a five litre petrol can, filled to the brim. Sherlock is the only one of us who doesn't waste time uttering expletives at that, but even he can't make Toby come here faster. He paces up and down with his hands behind his back and his fingers twitching at a rate that makes me giddy just to look at, until the labrador retriever and his handler show up after ten seemingly endless minutes.

And then they're off at top speed, down the road, Toby in the middle, his nose on the tarmac, the dog handler in his high-vis jacket – thankfully, a very fit young man – on his left, Sherlock with his dark coat billowing out behind him on his right. They're an absurd trio, seen from the passenger seat of the police car we follow them in, racing along like that, the leather soles of Sherlock's shoes flashing white in the almost darkness – shoes that would give me blisters just walking a mile at a sedate pace in. But he's running and running, not to show off how long he can keep going, not to prove that he's clever because he alone knew where to look for the scent they're following now, not for any other purpose but that of saving the lives of two little girls who happen to have a psycho for a father.

I get a strange feeling in my chest then. Something in it contracts with a little twinge, nothing disturbing, nothing disquieting, over again in a second, but still a clear, physical reaction to what I'm seeing there. Later, I will remember that as the moment when Sherlock Holmes truly made a place for himself in my heart. Did I ever say that you can't like him? All rubbish. You can't not.

But right now, we have other things to worry about. We've gone a little over a mile, and Toby slows down, then comes to a halt on a street corner. He pads around in a little circle, sniffing here and there, clearly confused. I can see his handler calling to him, encouraging him, and Sherlock literally bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet with impatience. Then MacDee radios in to tell us that the ex-wife is finally starting to make sense. If we turn left here, we're straight on the way to a builder's yard where the man we're hunting was last working on implementing some new accounting software. He's a freelance IT consultant, had been with the builders for the entire past week, and was scheduled to return there tomorrow morning. Might even have a key.

There is no need to translate that into an actual order. The dog handler, his own radio still at his ear, gives us the thumbs up and steers Toby in the right direction, relaying the news to Sherlock while Toby tries to pick up the scent. A moment later, the dog's got it, and they're off again.

In the end, of course, they're too late. Another mile further on, the three of them literally stumble into the builder's yard, its gate wide open, all the floodlights on, the burgundy red Renault Clio parked in front of the low office building to the right of the entrance.

And on the flat roof, as if only waiting for his audience to arrive, there is the man with a little girl on either side of him, the two kids terrified into silence, and all three of them already dripping with something that we all know isn't water.

He waits for us to get out of the car so we all get a prime view, but he doesn't wait longer than that. Due to some freakish chemical reaction, the deflagration is enormous. A fireball ten feet high rises from their place on the roof, and within its glare, the three figures, one tall and two short, are nothing but dark outlines that twitch and jerk for a moment before they crumble. Then the blinding light dies down again as quickly as it came, dissolving in smoke and a stench that there is no point in describing to anyone who hasn't smelt it themselves.

But that is not the image that truly sticks in my mind for days and weeks afterwards.

It is not even the image of what we find when we finally get onto that roof. Not even the sounds that one of the girls is still making when we reach her, and that she continues to make for another three or four minutes until her body, too, gives out at last. There's not a square inch of her skin left intact where any of us could have touched her for comfort in her last moments, not without increasing her agony tenfold.

The image that I do take with me from that place is that of the two beings who took us there, and who, unlike the rest of us, were there not because it is their job but because it is their nature. Two beings, side by side in the yard, the dog sitting on its haunches, tongue lolling, flanks heaving from the long run; the man squatting, no, kneeling on the ground next to the dog, his arm over the animals' back, his face raised to the roof turned pyre, and the reflection of the flames dancing in his pale eyes as he stares, and stares, and stares at the utter ruin of all his efforts.

#

It should be easy to wash our hands of this case as well, since it sports all the usual aspects of complete unpredictability. But all the same, it wreaks havoc with the duty roster of the local police station for the entire rest of the week. I send the two uniformed colleagues that were in the car with me home the same night, one because he can't seem to stop retching, and the other because she can't seem to stop crying, and small blame to them. Of the four more who came on the scene a little later, two report sick the next morning, and the two remaining ones try to keep up appearances for a day or two longer before they give in, too.

And at New Scotland Yard, MacDee and I spend the next morning sitting vis-à-vis at our desks, staring over each other's heads at the walls with vacant eyes, silently competing for the worse hangover. Then MacDee gets up, leaves the room for his third coffee and his second aspirin, and doesn't return until half an hour later, looking pale as death. I send him home then, too.

Sherlock Holmes disappears.

He doesn't call me, doesn't text me, doesn't come to see me in my office and doesn't even turn up uninvited at any of our next crime scenes. He's just gone, as if he's fallen out of my life.

For the first couple of days, I don't wonder at it. He's pissed off with us, that's what. Doesn't want anything to do any more with us bunch of dilettantes. After the news blackout is lifted, nobody in the press fails to point out the literally nothing that we could have done to stop the tragedy happening. But for all the friendly media coverage, _he_ will be convinced that things could have gone better. I could have called him in earlier. Toby could have been on hand sooner. If we hadn't just barged into the builder's yard in our frenzy to save the girls, but scouted around a little more carefully, we might have been able to take the man by surprise and overwhelm him.

Futile, pointless thoughts, and I learned long ago not to let those keep me awake at night. But they would chafe him raw. I haven't forgotten the look on his face when all hell broke loose in that yard. He'll want to blame someone for it, he'll want to shout and rant and rage, in the hope that that will make it easier to bear. Just like all of us used to do when we were younger and just starting on the job.

Around day four, it strikes me how odd it is that he's doing nothing of the sort. I've never known him to pull punches before when he felt that there was someone to blame for a mishap. My mind goes back to the scene in the hospital corridor a few months before, when I walked in on him and Sally Donovan having their shouting match over the questioning of the child witnesses. Whatever it is that upsets him, he doesn't just walk away from it. The world has to know it, and it will always be told in no uncertain terms. Why not this time?

On the fifth day, I find myself calling his number to ask whether he doesn't want to come over and have a go at us for cocking up, in a manner of concluding the issue and giving us all the chance to forget it and move on. It just rings out. He doesn't reply to the texts I send him, either.

On day seven, I stop trying.

On day nine, I start wondering whether he ever really existed at all. The idea is ludicrous, of course, but there was always something slightly unreal about him, in the way he spoke and moved and looked, some indefinable, changeling quality that made him stand out wherever he went and whatever he did. Maybe he wasn't quite human after all, but rather a visitor from some strange other world. And now he's gone back home.

I must have gone a ridiculously long way down that road in my mind, because I don't even hear Philip Anderson knocking on the jamb of the open door of my office. Only when he clears his throat loudly in addition do I turn back from looking out of the window into nothingness, and ask him what's up.

"Heard from your sniffer dog lately?" he says, unable and probably also unwilling to keep an undertone of triumph out of his voice.

For a second, I think that he must be talking about the invaluable Toby. Then I realise that he's talking about Toby's human counterpart.

"No," I snap at him.

He smiles wryly at my sharp tone.

"Well, I have. Just stumbled across him on the network, looking for something else entirely." He pushes a strand of his dark hair out of his eyes, trying to look nonchalant.

"Go on."

He shrugs. "Wednesday last, Royal London A&amp;E." He looks at me expectantly, as if he can't wait for me to ask for the details.

Several possibilities race through my mind. One too many of his usual smartarse comments, to some yobbo who shut him up a little too effectively? Or one of the few truly dangerous men we came across in the last months coming after him to settle the score? Or - anything except what Philip says a second later.

"Heroin overdose."

If he'd dare, he'd be smirking.

"So?" I say, folding my arms across my chest, because there it is again, that little twinge that makes my breath hitch for a moment. The single word comes out a lot more sharply than I intended, but it's all good. What does Anderson think he's doing, nosing around confidential medical information that has nothing to do with the cases he's currently assigned to?

No need to put that into words. Philip's expression changes, from self-satisfaction to something between disappointment and resentment.

"Don't shoot the messenger," he mumbles, more right than I care to admit. "I just thought you'd want to know."

"Thank you," I tell him, willing my voice to sound cold and detached.

I get up to close the door behind him even before he turns to leave, all but throwing him out of my office. Thankfully, he bunks off without further comment. When I'm back at my computer to open the database, my hands are shaking.

The details are spartan, but the one piece of information that I'm looking for most urgently is there at the bottom of the entry, dated four days after the event. Discharged – alive, obviously - to a private clinic out in the sticks, somewhere in the Peak District. I've heard the name before. It's the kind of place where celebrities end up when they go bonkers. Well. That is something, at least. They're not equipped for acute treatment, let alone for intensive care, so he must have been out of the worst again already on the fourth day. And isn't that all I wanted to know, and more even than what I'm legally entitled to know?

But the questions – even just the practical questions - come crowding in quicker than my tired mind can shut them out. Who made the decision to send him there? Who took him there? Who's paying for the five star standard they're reputedly offering their patients? How is he doing? Taking long walks, relishing the clean air and the beautiful scenery of the National Park? Meeting with a committed therapist for some helpful, civilised counselling sessions?

I snort at the computer screen, and then I bite my lip. Why is that so completely unimaginable, when it would be the very best thing that could happen to anyone else in the same situation?

I can hear his voice in my head. _Because I'm not just anyone else in the same situation._

Sometimes I wish he was, for his own sake.

It's only then that I finally grasp what it must have been that made him turn to heroin in the first place. When Anderson told me he was on something, I disagreed; but I didn't realise at the time that he _couldn't_ have been on anything but the case. Because whatever else he may have dabbled in out of curiosity, that brain of his really doesn't need more stimulation. It needs something to work _on_, but it doesn't need to work even faster or better than it already does. On the contrary. If there is too little to work on, or only the wrong kind of thoughts, it wants to be numbed. It's as simple as that. Once I understand that, everything that I've seen with my own eyes and that I know from the records falls into place.

But why it's taken me nine days to get what must have been going on with him is something that I'll never understand.

I pull up the clinic's website, find their contact details, and dial the number.

They do justice to their reputation. They're obviously experts at fending off nosy reporters and obtrusive paparazzi hunting for the latest news and pictures of our fallen idols. The reception I get, even calling from a regular Met landline that should be above suspicion, and identifying myself with my full name and rank, is meticulously polite but Antarctic in temperature.

"I'm very sorry, Detective Inspector, but we're really not at liberty to discuss our patients on the phone. If this is related to a criminal investigation, please fax us a copy of the court order authorising us to release the information you're after."

I tell the lady that I will, and hang up, glad that she offered me this quick way out of an abuse of authority and an attempted breach of medical confidentiality. I really should be worried to what extent I've become willing to bend rules to suit my own purposes. Serves me right not to get anywhere.

The questions that come crowding in in the quiet of the night aren't practical ones, but they're no less urgent. What did he think, what did he feel, when he woke up in the ICU at the Royal London? Was he glad to be alive? Was he disappointed? Did he even care? Did he regret anything he'd done? Or would he do it again?

Statistically, the risk of overdose is highest for addicts after a lengthy period of abstinence, because then their tolerance to the drug has often become lower than they suspect it has. There's a good chance that what happened wasn't intentional. Still, he took that risk. Why?

The answer is, of course, right there in my head, in the image that has been haunting me for nine consecutive days and nights now. Whenever I close my eyes, I still see his, reflecting the flickering firelight, but underneath that, a deep, deep void. Deep enough, as I now know for a fact, to swallow a man whole.

I try to tell myself that it was his choice. He's a grown man, and an intelligent man, and nobody forced him to go down that road again. But it doesn't make the dull ache in my chest go away.

#

On day ten, when I come back to my office after lunch, I find a stack of files on my desk, more than a foot high. There is a post-it note on the topmost one, saying "Lestrade" in the Chief Superintendent's barely legible scrawl. Just like him – no instructions, no word of explanation. I pick up the phone and call his secretary.

A cold case, she tells me. 1998, apparent accident or suicide, possibly homicide, the suspect a foreigner, left the country before the investigation was formally concluded, files closed ever since. To be reviewed, with a view to whether the suspect can be fully cleared of suspicion. Results in a week's time, please.

"Why now?" I ask.

"Orders from on high," she replies drily. "The suspect from back then wants to enter the UK again, and the Home Office seems to be trying to pave the way for her." There is nothing she hasn't seen in over forty years with the force, so the idea doesn't seem to vex her half as much as it does me.

I frown. "But why me?" I insist.

"Because the Super thought you could do with something quiet, abstract and entirely theoretical, for a change."

"Not in a million years."

"Well, I do," she admits, with unwonted warmth in her voice. "What, are you complaining, Greg? You don't want to upset the Indonesian military attaché by telling the Border Agency that he'd better not bring his intended bride into the country, because there's a murder charge still hanging over her?"

"_What?"_

"Results in a week's time, please", she repeats.

"The desired result, or the real result?" I ask, torn between exasperation and resignation.

"The real result", she assures me. "It's only the Indonesian military attaché after all, you know." She chuckles. "And if the Super wanted to make sure he got only the desired result, he wouldn't have given the files to you."

"That a compliment, Helen?"

"What did you think it was?"

She hangs up, and I smile, for the first time in over a week.

I take the files home with me when I leave that night, and I put them on the desk in the spare bedroom. Bedtime reading for the weekend.

#

Day eleven - Thursday - brings the next surprise, and it's the final straw. This time, it's MacDee who comes bearing the news, and I'm glad it's him, because I really don't need more looks of covert sympathy or open disapproval from any of my other colleagues. Philip Anderson's accidental discovery that the man who's been responsible for four out of five spectacular successes of my team in the past six months is in fact a pathetic heroin addict has made the rounds, of course. Sally Donovan, for example, although on the same floor as me and an eager frequenter of the same coffee machine, hasn't exchanged a word with me for two days.

"It's about Sherlock Holmes," MacDee says, and I know it's bad news because he's hovering in the open door as if poised for flight, turning his coffee mug nervously in his hands.

"Then come in and shut the door," I tell him. "Whatever he's done now, it's not like I'm going to eat you or throw things at you or anything."

Am I trying to convince him, or myself?

"Honestly, I thought you might," he replies without the least hint of a smile, and then he proceeds to pull the rug out from under me. "There's a warrant out against him. Issued the day before yesterday, by the Manchester and Salford Magistrates' court."

I put my elbows on the desk and press the palms of my hands to the sides of my face, trying to keep my head from exploding. "What's the charge?"

MacDee gives me an apologetic look. "The whole works, I'm afraid. Possession _and_ supply. Resisting arrest, too."

"Day before yesterday?"

"Mmh."

"He was supposed to be in that clinic."

"Looks like he's relocated."

Looks like we've lost him for good.

MacDee raises his coffee mug in a cynical toast. "Good luck to the colleagues in Manchester, then?"

I don't reply.

#

I try to take my mind off things for the rest of the day, but of course, by early afternoon, I'm on the phone with Greater Manchester Police, trying to find out more.

I can't get my head around how I could have been so mistaken about him. I never saw any reason to doubt which side he was truly on. Was he really just playing a game, every time we called him in to hunt down someone who'd flouted the law? Was he secretly mocking us all the time? I thought he cared about right and wrong, the same way that we do.

The sergeant from the GMP drug squad whom I get put through to after ten minutes of futile enquiries tells me he's got no details on the case either. Like us, all he can see is the name, the date and the charge. He can't seem to pull up a copy of the actual warrant, but they've been having computer trouble all day, maybe try again tomorrow?

It's after nine p. m. when MacDee does something unheard of, and asks me why I don't just go home.

Because I'm still poring over the file of this ugly armed robbery in Islington, would be the obvious answer. Trying to match the details of the act with anything similar from the past five years, while we're waiting for the colleagues in forensics to do the same with the DNA samples. No lead so far; perseverance and thoroughness will find us one. It worked before, tolerably well. It will again.

Because I am, irrationally, still waiting for our colleagues in Manchester to get back to me even though I know they won't before tomorrow, would be the truthful answer. Of course I don't put that into words. But I'm grateful to MacDee anyway that he's shown me the absurdity of my conduct.

"I guess you're right," is what I end up saying. "Not that anyone's waiting for me, though."

He pulls a face in sympathy. "Oh no. She's not walked out on you again?"

"Not really, this time. But her dad's just got a new knee joint, and she's gone down to Dorset to help her mum out for a week or so til the old man's back on his feet."

Of course, she also added, when she got into the car with her suitcase the day before yesterday, that a bit of distance might do both of us good. That was on the morning of the day when Philip found out about Sherlock overdosing.

I put on my jacket and leave.

#


	4. Chapter 4

The trip home on the tube and the bus is tedious, and by the time I reach the house I'm soaked as well. Needless to say, the rain stops the moment I put my key in the lock. A hot shower is what I need now, and then the luxury of eight uninterrupted hours of sleep. MacDee's on call tonight, not me. The London underworld can rise in concerted rebellion against the forces of the law for all I care, I want nothing to do with it until tomorrow. Nothing to do with_ anything._

And that is my last thought before I turn on the landing of the stairs to our first floor flat, and find him sitting there in the darkness, right on my doorstep.

The relief that floods me at the mere sight of him, alive and at least conscious, is enormous. The anger that kicks in only a moment later is no less overwhelming.

"What the _fuck_ are you doing here?" I burst out.

"Keeping out of the rain," he doesn't answer my question. His deep voice is steady, if a little hoarse. "The quality of the lock downstairs made your house a natural choice."

He pushes back the hood that covers his head, and he smiles at me lopsidedly. I know for a fact by now that he wasn't born in a suit, but he does look odd in a dark hoodie, dirty jeans and well-worn trainers. Smaller, somehow. He's also paler than usual under the stubble of several days, and his eyes are sunken into deep dark hollows. There is a sheen of moisture on his face and hair.

"The rain's stopped," I inform him.

"Meaning 'Get out'?"

He coughs, the deep, rattling cough of a chain smoker that I know he is not, and he crosses his arms, tucking his hands under his armpits as if to keep them warm. It's impossible to tell whether he's being pitiful on purpose or not, but that's what he is, hunched there on the floor at my feet. And something I _can_ tell, even in the dim half-light, is that his eyes look so dark because something has blown his pupils out of all proportion. I can feel my hands clench into fists.

"Meaning we can leave straight away to take you where you legally belong."

He makes a strange, jerky movement at that, like a convulsion that passes over his entire body, from the feet up. But he's got it under control again in a moment, bracing his shoulders against the wooden railing of the banister.

"You going to have me arrested, or what?"

"There's a warrant out in your name, don't you think that's reason enough?"

"There's a what?"

Stupid really doesn't suit him.

"You mean you didn't know?"

"No, I didn't." He wipes his nose on the back of his hand. Then he chuckles. "But I'd have been surprised if not."

I'm not sure what reaction I expected - worry? embarrassment? resignation? - but what I didn't expect is amusement, and it drives me up the wall. After all, I've looked at that blasted entry in the database enough times today for the words to have burned themselves into the retinas of my eyes. Possession. Supply. Resisting arrest. No laughing matters, really not. Doing his best to kill himself is one thing, but dragging other poor devils down with him really isn't on. And obstructing police officers in the execution of their duty isn't exactly the surest way to endear anyone to me, either. I resist the urge to aim a kick at him.

"Get up," I tell him, putting as much of the kick as I can into my voice instead. "We're going."

He doesn't move. "Oh, come on. Your car isn't available. I heard you arrive on foot. And you're not going to drag me back to the Yard on public transport tonight, are you?"

"I could easily arrange for a trip in a police car, you know. And if you don't fancy that, there's a station here, not half a mile away, just off the high street. Short walk. Nice cosy rooms, too, for sleeping off whatever you're high on right now."

He snorts derisively, and wipes his nose again. His hand, as he raises it to his face, is trembling. Then he coughs again, too, and it sets his whole body shaking uncontrollably. He hugs himself, trying to contain it, and presses his lips together, blinking nervously as he waits for the shudders to subside. Whatever else is circulating in his veins at the moment, he's also caught some nasty cold, or even the flu. And I've seen the bare, tiled holding cells of our local police station often enough to know they're not the best environment for recovering from that sort of thing. Besides, I can feel my eight hours of sleep slipping through my fingers. The paperwork alone -

"Okay, deal," I suggest before I can think better of it. "Get inside for now. But we'll go first thing in the morning."

He does get up then, steadying himself against the banister and closing his eyes dizzily for a moment. I unlock the door to our flat and push it open. He walks inside ahead of me, shuffling his feet, nothing left of the usual spring in his step. In the hall, he stops, waiting for me to close the door and switch on the light. The sudden glare does little to shrink his pupils to normal size, but it mercilessly reveals the full extent of the squalor and misery that I've just admitted into my home. His face isn't wet from the rain as I thought, it's grubby with sweat. There is a smear of something whitish and sticky across one of his cheeks, and it looks like some of it has even got into his hair on that side of his head, matting it.

My brain doesn't want to believe it, but my stomach heaves with disgust. Good God. Impossible. He can't have sunk that low. But if I asked him, he'd probably just shrug and tell me that he needed the money.

What I should feel is pity. All I do feel is rage. In the blink of an eye, I've got his arm locked behind his back, and I'm frogmarching him down the hall and into our small bathroom. He gives a little yelp at the firmness of my grip, but he knows better than to add to his current record.

"Head down," I order when we're at the washbasin, emphasising it with a little extra twist to his arm that gives him no choice but to double over. I fumble one-handed with the taps until I've got the water running, then duck his head right under them and comb the mess out of his hair with my fingers. He keeps it down obediently, and when I tell him to wash his face, too, he does it without protest, rubbing at his cheeks with his one free hand, gargling and spitting until I decide that we're done. I let go of him then, and he straightens up with a groan, dripping water like a wet dog but looking at least a little more human. I pick up the next best towel from the rack - one of Judy's, as it happens - and thrust it at him.

"Alright," I tell him. "Now get out of your clothes."

He looks at me in genuine surprise, then raises the towel to his face, takes a deliberate, deep sniff, and throws it back to me.

"She's not been gone more than three days," he sneers. "You really that desperate already?"

I have no idea where the fist comes from, but it must be mine, because it's my knuckles that are smarting a moment later, and it's his head that jerks back. The force of the blow makes him stumble backwards and sit down heavily on the edge of the bath tub.

We stare at each other in silence for close on half a minute. Then he exhales heavily, blinks, shakes his head as if to clear it, and gently fingers the skin just below his right eye, already burning red.

"Not all that desperate just yet," I inform him. "But there is a limit to the amount of filth I tolerate in my house. And believe it or not, also to the amount of bullshit I'm willing to take from you."

He gives me a dirty look, and then with abrupt, jerky movements, he does start taking off the clothes he's wearing. One after the other, the hoodie declaring him to be a member of the Manchester Community College rugby team, the t-shirt declaring him – even more absurdly - to be a fan of the Sex Pistols, the shoes and the jeans land on the floor in a heap.

"What now?" he asks tonelessly, shivering in only his boxers, and I steer him in the direction of the spare bedroom. He slumps down on the narrow bed, looking just dog-tired now, dog-tired and defeated, all the belligerence, even all the resentment gone from his face, leaving it completely blank.

He doesn't thank me when I place a glass of water on the bedside table for him. But when I drop a clean t-shirt in his lap, he puts it on and then lies down with a sigh so deep that his whole body seems to heave with it.

I lower the blinds on the window. "Right. Try and sleep. And you can consider yourself under arrest as of this moment, so don't get any funny ideas about the window and the downpipe, or anything like that."

"Uh. No. Not twice in a week, thank you. I'll just take the front door." He covers his eyes with his bare forearm, shielding them from the light of the lamp. I'm not sure whether he means me to notice them or not, but the needle marks in his pallid skin are plainly visible. And recent, by the colour of the little bruises around them.

"Aren't you going to read me my rights or something?" he asks after a moment of silence.

"Yep. And the riot act. But I'm saving that for when you're lucid enough again to actually grasp the meaning of the words."

He laughs outright at that, a rueful, bitter laugh. "Might as well get it over with."

"I can wait."

"How long?"

"As long as it takes."

He takes his arm away from his face and looks up at me, his lip curling. "Be careful what you wish for, Lestrade."

He's crying, though. Very strangely, and in complete contradiction to the cynical tone of his voice, tears are running down his face now. He wipes them away automatically, without any visible sign of anger or shame, but they keep coming. Who would have thought.

But then I remember that he's not himself, and that nothing that he does or says in this state can be honest and genuine, so I'd better not fool myself into believing that it is. I go and fetch a box of tissues from the bathroom. By the time I'm back, he's already getting under the covers.

"Turn the light off, will you," he mutters.

I do him the favour. "Got everything you need, then?" I ask into the darkness, thoughtlessly, heartlessly, but at this point I really don't get it yet. So I don't get either why he's laughing again, almost hysterically now, as if I've just made a hilarious joke. I don't get it, but it very effectively drives me from the room.

#

I awake to the sound of blows. Violent, vicious blows, bare fists against human flesh, unmistakably. Small noises of pain, too, pitiful little whimpers. Then silence for a while. This makes no sense. I glance at the digits on the clock radio beside my bed: 4:12 a. m. From the next room, the rustling of bedclothes, a body shifting restlessly on a mattress, and I remember. Fully awake now, I get up.

Am I disappointed to find that he's still there? Was I really hoping that he'd sling his hook at the first opportunity, and save me the humiliation of hauling my own secret weapon in the war against crime off on an indictable charge? But either way, he's still occupying our spare bedroom, and that's either an insult that I should resent fiercely, or the strangest compliment that I've ever got.

Or maybe he's just too out of sorts to even rise from the bed.

Looking at him from the open door, it's very probably that. He's curled up on his side, eyes squeezed shut and nose still running, his breath coming in short, laboured gasps. He twitches when I sit down on the edge of the bed and put a hand on his shoulder, but he doesn't open his eyes. The borrowed t-shirt he's wearing is so soaked with sweat that it clings to his skin, and so are the sheets.

"Go back to sleep," he mutters. "I'm fine."

As if to prove the absurdity of this statement, a violent shudder passes over him, much worse now than those I witnessed hours earlier, without knowing then what they were. His legs start jerking and twitching convulsively, and he clenches his hands into fists and starts fighting back, punching and pummelling every inch of his legs that he can reach.

I close my fingers around his wrists, firmly but not roughly. His arms and hands go rigid at the touch, but I don't let him pull them out of my grasp. For a moment, we struggle silently, until he relents. His skin is clammy and cold, and under my fingers, I can feel his pulse racing.

"But it hurts," he complains, more sulky than angry.

"I know."

It would. And what a fool I was not to have recognised the signs for what they were. The truth was already staring me in the face when I found him on the stairs, hours ago. The sweaty, cold skin, the shivering, the twitchy movements, the dizziness, the runny nose, the teary eyes, even the dilated pupils. I've seen it often enough in others. I can't believe that I let my anger blind me to it, this time of all times. "Got everything you need?" I asked him before I left him to his own devices earlier that night, and he laughed his head off at it. Because, of course, that summed up the problem with uncanny precision. By now, every fibre of his body must be screaming like a fury for what it thinks it needs. He can't have slept for a single minute.

The next wave is already coming on, his legs are twitching again, and I tighten my hold on his wrists. There is a reason why it's called kicking the habit, I remember as I watch his lower extremities contract and extend again, contract and extend, as if in some ghastly parody of a fitness exercise. Then the tension ebbs away, at least a little. Half a minute of respite for both of us, deep breaths, then the same thing all over again. Contract. Hold down. Breathe.

"Sherlock?"

He makes a small answering noise, eyes still closed.

"Why didn't you bloody _tell_ me?"

He opens one eye, then squeezes it shut again and grits his teeth as the next fit comes on. Contract. Hold down. Breathe. We seem to have found a rhythm now that works for both of us.

"Would've been stating the obvious, wouldn't it?" he gasps. "As usual, Lestrade, you see, but you don't ob- oh Christ."

One of his hands slips out of my grasp, and I only just manage to catch it again before he can land another punch on his thigh. Hold down. Breathe. My shoulders are beginning to ache. He's crying again, and this time I'm not sure that it's just an overreaction of the lachrymal glands. I don't dare let go of his hands to find a tissue.

Minutes pass.

"Sherlock?"

"Mmh?"

"How long's it been now?"

"What's the time?"

"Half past four."

"Of what day?"

"Friday morning."

"Forty-seven hours."

"Bloody hell."

"Good summary."

#

Twenty minutes later, I'm busy picking up his discarded clothes from the bathroom floor and stuffing them in the washing machine, all but the shoes.

"I'm taking your phone," I tell my unexpected guest as I go through the pockets of his jumper and his jeans. "Just in case."

"Just in case what?" he mutters drowsily, turning his head towards me on the folded towel that serves him as a pillow. From the neck downwards, he's immersed in hot, almost unbearably hot water, the bath tub filled almost to overflowing.

"You know what. And don't even think about nicking mine, or using the landline."

"No," he drawls. "They'll have been tapped anyway."

He doesn't sound particularly concerned, but I make a mental note to check online whether paranoia is a frequent symptom of withdrawal from opiates.

There is no phone. No money, either. Just a crumpled train ticket in the back pocket of his jeans. I unfold it. Birmingham New Street to Euston, validated at 14:45 yesterday afternoon. I look up at him in surprise. He's been watching me, an almost amused expression on his face.

"Are you telling me that you travelled all the way down here from Manchester in this state?"

"There's a reason why it took me two days, you know."

Jesus Christ. I won't even begin to try and imagine how he managed that. Going cold turkey. Without money. As a wanted man.

He's reading my thoughts, as usual. "Not so bad, really. Gave me something to do. Somewhere to get to."

"Somewhere with a bath tub, you mean?"

He smiles sleepily, eyes half closed. The hot water is absolutely doing the trick.

"Sherlock?"

"Mmh?"

"Did you really -" I break off, unable and unwilling to put it into words.

He raises his eyes to me again, and a corner of his mouth goes up. "What, run out of hankies? Yeah, I'm afraid I did, somewhere between Stafford and Wolverhampton." He sniffs loudly. "It really is annoying. Didn't think the sight would offend you quite so much, though," he adds with a yawn, "or I'd have washed before I came here."

And with that, he closes his eyes fully, and lets me figure that out for myself. I do, and I don't think even he has ever managed to make me feel more stupid.

And then it's time to get him out of the water again, to stop his skin shrivelling too badly.

"What do we do now?" I ask him, honestly at a loss, when I've got him back in bed and under fresh sheets. I'm not thinking ahead more than three or four hours at this point, but those are enough of a problem as it is. I've been stifling yawns for the past ten minutes, with gradually diminishing success, but I don't think I can risk leaving him alone like this.

"Sleep?" he suggests humourlessly. The first grey light of pre-dawn is already filtering in through the blinds.

"So you can start beating the crap out of yourself again?"

He quirks an eyebrow at me. "Well, someone's got to do it when you're not available."

I grimace, and try to look anywhere but at the first traces of the black eye that I gave him the night before, just beginning to blossom above his left cheekbone.

"Tie me down, if you like," he says, in a disturbingly matter-of-fact tone. "It's not going to get better for a while yet."

He would know. He must also know that he's being absurd.

"Listen, it will be my career, my marriage _and_ my good name if anyone finds out that I'm in the habit of keeping half-undressed men tied to my bed."

"It's not _your_ bed, and are you telling me it _is_ a habit?"

"Oh, sod you."

#

I check on him again two and a half hours of guilty, uneasy sleep later. He has found his own way by then of putting the idea into practice. He's face down on the mattress, and he's plucked up the corners of the sheet and twisted his hands into them, one on either side of his head, clinging to the fabric like a drowning man to a lifeline. I can't see it, but I suspect that he's digging his teeth into the pillow, too. The cold chills are back, as are the heavy sweats. When I see his legs seize up again, too, I make a decision, back out of the room in silence, and go to find my own phone.

MacDee buys my story with touching sympathy, and it makes me feel like the world's greatest scumbag. But that's still better than making him an accomplice in what is, technically, perverting the course of justice. And for all I know, not just technically.

"Stomach bug, is it?" he asks, his concern clearly audible in his voice.

"Yeah, 'fraid so. Vomit all over the bathroom floor." That bit isn't true, either, but it probably will be soon enough.

"Well, stay in bed. Ginger tea helps. Listen, d'you need anything? I could stop by, you know, no problem."

As if I didn't know that he lives on the other side of London. Bless him.

"No, I'll be fine."

"Right. Hang in there, then. See you on Monday."

"MacDee – there is something though."

Am I making a mistake, I wonder, drawing attention to the issue when I really shouldn't?

"What is it?"

"Have you heard anything from Manchester?"

A pause.

"No, I haven't."

"Can you give me a shout when you do?"

"Are you sure this can't wait til Monday?"

"I'd just like to know."

"Alright. I will."

#


	5. Chapter 5

"Breakfast," I announce when I come into Sherlock's room again. It's not Sherlock's room, of course. It's the bedroom of the child that Judy and I never had. The irony of it isn't lost on me.

I'm carrying a plate with some dry toast on it, and more Gatorade, the yellow one this time.

We had a little argument about this earlier in the morning, after his bath, when it turned out that he hadn't touched his glass of water all night, and that his hands were trembling too badly anyway to hold it without spilling half the contents. I went to fetch him a gym bottle from the kitchen then, and happened on Judy's stock of isotonic drinks, small plastic bottles complete with the kind of cap that pulls out to drink from. Just what we needed. I picked an electric blue one first, to cheer him up, and of course that backfired completely.

"Plain honest diamorphine is out," he scoffed, "but you want me to drink something that looks like detergent and tastes like cat piss?"

"You're not going to die of dehydration if I can help it. And how do you know what cat piss tastes like, anyway?"

At which he pulled a face, held his nose and knocked back half the bottle in one go.

"Breakfast," I say now. "And then you're going back in the tub."

He turns over heavily and blinks up at me. "I thought you were going to walk me somewhere?"

"You sound disappointed."

"Walking would be good." He stretches out his long legs, and smiles almost apologetically. "Walking would help." As if to confirm it, his legs give another twitch, and he presses his lips shut in response.

"Well, maybe you're right. Bit of fresh air might do you good, too."

"No way," he mutters. "He'd pluck me right off the street."

Definitely need to read up on paranoia during withdrawal.

#

When I return from the bathroom, showered, shaved and dressed, he hasn't touched his toast.

"Not hungry," he mumbles at my disapproving look.

"Of course you're not. But you're still eating that."

I'm not going to convince him. Distraction is what we need. Getting him to talk would be fine, but talking and chewing at the same time won't work. I glance around the room for inspiration, and there is the solution, sitting right on my small desk, as if someone had placed it there for exactly that purpose. I sit down in the desk chair, pick up the topmost file, swivel round to face the bed and flick the folder open on my lap.

"Right. You're going to eat, and I'm going to read this to you."

"What is it?" he asks indifferently.

"Something that couldn't be more fitting." The thought has only just occurred to me, and it makes me chuckle. "A cold case. Like you."

A sardonic grin is all I get in response, but he does sit up then, takes a slice of toast and starts munching on it, while I start reading aloud.

It takes him one and a half hours to get down two slices, but by that time, we've both got a good grasp of what the case is about, and I can clearly see why the Indonesian military attaché is hesitating to bring his lady back into the country.

1998\. A businessman – on the face of it, a very well-off, successful businessman – by the name of Neil Gibson, in his early fifties, died of what the autopsy revealed to be an overdose of insulin. He was a type 1 diabetic who injected insulin twice daily, so there is no mystery in where he got the stuff and the necessary equipment. He was also a man with a very stressful, irregular lifestyle; meetings, business trips, working fourteen hours a day on average and often sixteen or more. His medical records show that his blood sugar levels derailed on a regular basis, and his GP frequently noted down "noncompliance". The good man also documented that Gibson drank a lot more alcohol than was advisable with his condition.

His wife, Svetlana, and his two sons – aged five and seven at the time of the tragedy – didn't see all that much of him. Neither did the new au pair girl that had been staying with them for eight weeks. Melati Sudarmaputri was her name - called Mel for short by everyone in the family - and unlike the other au pairs they'd had staying with them before, she wasn't Russian, like Gibson's wife. She was Indonesian, from Bandung on Java, and by the photographs, she was a petite, round-faced, sweet and also very pretty girl of nineteen, still almost a child herself.

The man died in his own bed, in his sleep, late at night. In the morning – separate bedrooms – his wife found him and called the ambulance. The pathologist confirmed that there was almost three times the required concentration of insulin in his body, as well as two equally recent injection marks on his thigh, right next to each other, and - unsurprisingly - a certain level of alcohol in his bloodstream. My colleagues in charge back then could find no evidence that anyone had entered Gibson's house that night who didn't have a right to be there.

Three possible explanations suggested themselves. The first was that it was a tragic accident; overwrought and drunk, he may have forgotten that he'd already had his nightly injection, and done it all over again, with fatal consequences. The second was that he did it on purpose; a closer look at his medical records and his recent business activities would show whether there was any reason to suspect suicide. The third was that someone helped him to it; someone who was familiar both with his condition, and with the effect that a double or triple dose of his regular medication would have on his body.

This is the point when Melati Sudarmaputri got in big, big trouble.

"Looks practically damning," Sherlock comments when we've gone through the initial reports, and the preliminary summary that was presented to the judge who eventually issued the warrant against the au pair girl.

Nobody could blame our colleagues from back then for coming to that conclusion.

Melati dreamed of becoming a doctor. She had already been admitted to the most prestigious medical school in her home country, and she was in fact in London in order to learn enough English to apply for a place in one of ours, too. Having lived in the Gibson household for weeks, the man's health troubles couldn't have escaped her, and she would have known how to turn it to her advantage.

Then there were those Western Union money transfers that she sent to her older sister in Indonesia. They started about ten days after she moved in with the Gibsons, and they exceeded the amount that she was given by them as monthly pocket-money by hundreds of pounds. The agency that placed her with the Gibsons - a thoroughly respectable business - had no explanation for this. But they added another piece to the puzzle by telling our investigators that Melati asked for a transfer to a different family not three days before Gibson's death. They were just about to offer her one when the man died.

There was also that inexplicable text message from his phone to hers, on the night when he died, according to the medical examiner within an hour of his actual death. 'Mel, I need you.' Before that, he had tried to call her directly, but unsuccessfully, since she had her own phone switched off already for the night. Trying to contact her was his last known activity before he met his end.

Those are the facts. But I also know that when Sherlock Holmes says "looks practically damning" about any evidence that we've gathered, we're very likely in for a complete turnaround, often so thoroughly that it makes our heads spin. At the very least, it means that the case has piqued his interest.

Because what remained unclear was the motive for Melati killing her employer. There were starting points, of course, and there is a reason why the results of the investigation fill five more folders, each of them as thick as my arm. Bless the Murder Investigation Team in charge for having been even more thorough than usual, to provide us with hundreds upon hundreds of pages of reading material. But in the end, Melati was released from custody, and she left the country to return home to Indonesia on the very same day. Somewhere in those pages must be the answer whether my predecessors were right to let her go or not, even though they didn't see it at the time.

This is as far as we get when Sherlock finishes his breakfast. It's amazing how quickly you learn to see the ingestion of two slices of dry toast as a major victory.

"Can I go back in the tub now?" he asks as soon as the last morsel has gone down, and who am I to say no. It's the only place on earth right now where he seems to feel even half-way at ease.

I make use of the first fifteen minutes of that respite for a quick nap on the sofa in the living room, then I go online. "Paranoia opiates withdrawal" typed into the search engine renders clear results. Not extremely common, but not unheard of, either. Will increase during withdrawal for patients with a known history of the disorder, but can also occur independently of a former condition. Fair enough.

I draw back the curtains in the living room then, and open one of the windows to let in some fresh air. The sky is overcast, with a promise of rain again later on. Not such a bad day to spend inside.

I also register the car that's parked on the other side of the road, two or three houses down from ours. A silver grey, medium-sized Mazda, and there's a man I've never seen in the neighbourhood before sitting behind the wheel, busy typing on his phone.

Who's paranoid now, I tell myself sternly as I close the window again.

#

"It's not about the body," Sherlock says without preamble when I come back into the bathroom to check whether he hasn't silently drowned, because it's so still in there. He hasn't, obviously. He looks almost relaxed.

"It's not about the body," he repeats when I don't reply. "It's all about the mind."

"Well, your body disagrees," I point out. "And rather loudly, too. Besides, the two may not be quite as separate as you like to think."

He gives me a disapproving look. "Yeah, and yoga helps, too." For a moment, a ghost of a grin flits across his face. I can feel the muscles of my face respond in kind.

"It's true though," he continues after a pause. "It's a neurochemical derailment that needs to be put straight again, that's all. Once you're aware of that, and keep yourself aware of it, you're perfectly safe."

A moment ago, I'd have been happy to share a laugh at the latest yoga craze with him. But now, his ramblings make me extremely uncomfortable. Is he really about to embark on one of those ridiculous, mock-logical discourses that the more intelligent addicts so often come up with to justify their habit? Not him, please. But it sounds just like it. Nobody else would call a natural feeling of grief and guilt a neurochemical derailment, and nobody else would think that courting death is a proper way to get back on track. I can feel the hair rise at the back of my neck.

"Right, please yourself. I'm not sure if you're trying to tell me anything specific. Are you?"

"Not at all," he replies drily, turns his head away and closes his eyes.

"Then tell me something else."

His eyes pop open again. "What?"

"I think you do owe me an explanation for one or two little things."

He tilts his head back and sighs. "You said you were saving the preaching for later."

"Oh, I am. But for now, I still need to know some things. Some _facts._" And I hurry on before he can cut me off. "Around five this morning, you told me that you'd been off the shit for two days and two nights already. Since early on Wednesday morning, that is."

He nods.

"Then how come you were already on it again, when you were still at that clinic on Tuesday?"

He grins humourlessly. "Who said I was?"

He's right. Nobody did. All their receptionist told me that day was that she wasn't telling me anything.

"So you left there, when?"

"Sunday night."

"Discharged as fully recovered, no doubt?" I suggest sarcastically. Somehow, I could deal better with outright lies or guilty prevarication than with this cold indifference to the truth.

"I discharged myself."

"Out of the window and down the pipe."

A corner of his mouth goes up at the memory. "Something like that. Saved a lot of tedious discussion though. "

"Then why the hell did you throw away the chance to go through this in one of the best places that exist for it in the whole country? And choose to do it in my bath tub instead?"

He sighs again. "I can go. I'll go right now." He even makes a move as if to get up out of the water.

"You're not going anywhere. You're going to explain yourself."

He leans back, resigned. "Fine. We disagreed."

"Who, we?"

"The doctors and I."

"On what exactly?"

I'll know, if I have to worm it out of him word by word.

He takes a moment to make up his mind. Then the words start coming out, in short spurts, abrupt and unwilling, but come they do. "On how to quit. I said I could do it like this. Straight away. They thought I couldn't. Or shouldn't. Wouldn't even let me try." He sniffs, and wipes his nose with a wet hand. "But what's the point, you tell me," he demands, popping out the "p" so aggressively that the tiled room echoes with it, "of keeping your body in a lifelong state of slavery, but denying your brain the one sort of relief that really works? Why doesn't _anyone _ever understand that? Anyone, ever?"

He rubs the palms of his hands across his face in frustration.

The only relief that really works? But at what price?

"You mean they wanted you to switch to methadone?" I steer him back to the facts.

"Yes, of course."

"And you didn't want that."

"No. I just told you – "

"And what made you so sure that you could manage to go cold turkey?"

"I've done it before."

"Right. And so you went to Manchester, and made sure you were doped up again to your eyeballs when you started quitting, to make the experience really worthwhile?"

He gives me a look of such bitter hurt that it almost takes my breath away. Yes, he did that, for whatever absurd reason. But he also, for whatever other reason, came to his senses again after just two days. And then he started on that desperate journey south that ended here in my bathroom. And all this simply because he felt that here, of all places, he would be understood, and here he would get the help that he needed.

He was counting on me to see what was wrong with him. He was counting on me to let him in and give him a place to rest. He was even counting on me to disregard the court order that required me to collar him the moment I set eyes on him. I should feel tricked, duped, used – but all I do feel at this moment is my anger ebbing away. It makes room for that now familiar little twinge in my chest that tells me that much as he _doesn't_ deserve it, I care.

Is giving him that breathing space, and as many hot baths and as much dry toast as it takes, really too much to ask for, if you see it as a repayment for that degree of trust?

There is one question still remaining, though. The one point that isn't about what's morally right or wrong, and all the grey shades in between, but about my clear-cut legal and professional duties.

"And at some point between saying goodbye to the beautiful Peak District, and embarking on the journey home," I remind him, "you ran into massive trouble with some of my northern colleagues."

"Oh, that warrant," is all he has to say to that. And then he startles me by taking a deep breath and plunging right below the surface. When he comes back up, splashing and splattering, almost a whole minute later, I don't raise the subject again.

#

Back out of the water, he's rapidly getting worse again. The relief never lasts long, more's the pity.

Day three is always the worst, he tells me through gritted teeth, between two new fits of that bone-crushing pain in the legs that still makes him want to punch them, and that still has me gripping his wrists to stop him doing it. The trick, he says, is to survive day three; everything that comes afterwards will be a picnic, by comparison.

At this point, I can barely imagine that there will be a life for either of us at all after today. The clock seems to have stopped, time seems to have been suspended, and we'll be stuck forever in this never-ending agony. It's not even noon yet, and my shoulders are already aching again from holding him down on the bed when the cramps come on. They've started to make him sob like a child, and given how he's managed to choke anything of that kind down until now, that's got every alarm bell ringing.

Mentally, he's fine, almost eerily so. I never hear him voice any complaints, never hear him express any doubts or second thoughts about what he's embarked on. He suffers like a dog, but he doesn't question it. If he's tempted at all to just clear out and get himself the one thing that would put an immediate end to his current distress, he's making an excellent job of keeping that to himself.

He's not a pleasant person to be around though. Meaning even less so than usual. He goes, within seconds, from what sounds like his old, cocksure self to howling misery and back again. Sometimes, that is when he doesn't have outright tears of pain streaming down his face, it's hard to tell just how bad he is. And that makes his actions and reactions utterly unpredictable. I urge him to drink something, and he rounds on me as if I've mortally offended him by the suggestion. Ten minutes later, he'll ask me with childlike simplicity to hold a mug of tea to his lips, to keep him from sloshing the hot liquid all over himself and the bed with his trembling hands. For a while, he's happy having long extracts from the Gibson file read to him. Then suddenly, he snaps at me to stop boring him with such utterly tedious tripe. He laughs at the idea of ordering Indonesian takeaway for lunch, and even tells me what his favourite dishes are. But when it arrives, he eats one spoonful of dry rice, then pushes the plate away. It's like he's been ageing backwards all day, and we seem to have settled on around four years old.

For a moment, I wonder what he must have been like when he was still truly a child. His teenage years must have been hell. Then I realise that, twenty-six though he may be on paper, these _are_ his teenage years.

Over the course of the afternoon, I discover a method to gauge the ups and downs better. With Sherlock in bed and me in my desk chair with my feet propped against the edge of his mattress, it works like a seismograph. I can feel the cold chills and the cramps coming from a long way off, small trepidations getting gradually worse. I can also feel when they're worse than usual, so I know when to watch out most. And I can feel the short moments of respite and relative ease, and I'm learning that those are the best times for suggesting a drink, or a bite, or for engaging in conversation. Talking is like treading water. It helps him to stay afloat.

And something else I discover, when I go and make fresh tea for us in the afternoon, is that there is still an unfamiliar car parked outside my house. It has changed its colour, make, position and occupant, but it has as little business to be here as the one I spotted in the morning.

This isn't paranoia. I know surveillance when I see it.

The question is, who is it, and why? If this was about that damned warrant, and they knew that I'm harbouring a wanted man in my home, they'd just ring the doorbell, with a copy of the thing in their hand and a suspension order for me to go with it. But there'd be no point in shadowing us for hours on end first.

And when did I start thinking of my own colleagues as "them", anyway?

So it will be, must be, somebody else, for some other reason. And it may not be the best idea to increase his troubles right now, but I need to know.

When I return with the tea, Sherlock has curled up under the duvet, and all that I can see of him is a bit of his dark hair peeking out.

"Sherlock?"

He turns over far enough so I can see one of his eyes – the black one - and makes a noncommittal noise.

"Are you in trouble with someone? I mean, apart from us?"

"Big trouble," he confirms after a moment's deliberation, but in a strangely indifferent tone, and turns away again, hiding his face. He doesn't even ask how I know.

"Someone from Manchester?" I insist. There must be a reason why he left that place head over heels.

"No." He's talking to the wall now.

"Then who is it?"

"Nobody you'd know."

"Listen, I just don't want any ugly surprises. I don't need a name. But I want to know whether there's anything I should watch out for."

Since you're in no state to look out for yourself, I think but don't add.

He sits up then and pushes his damp hair out of his eyes. "It's fine, Lestrade," he says in a tired voice. "It's nothing to do with you, and it isn't dangerous, so don't worry about it."

That's easier said than done when you feel like your own home has just been turned into a fortress under siege.

"And now where's that tea?" he demands, three and a half at best. "I'm_ cold._"

I sigh, and hand him his mug. "Yeah, I know. Tell me something new."

#


	6. Chapter 6

By early evening, we've gone through the entirety of Neil Gibson's medical records – a lot of endocrinology and hepatology, but nothing psychiatric, no hint of depression or any other mental disorder that might have made him feel suicidal. We've also gone through the entirety of his wife's witness statements. We've learned a lot about his business connections – he was on first name terms with all the oil barons of Russia – and very little about the state of his marriage. Which, as I can attest, _is_ usually all the information you need to get a good picture. Svetlana Gibson was convinced that her husband's death was an accident, rather than suicide or murder. Small blame to her - it's the explanation that's easiest to live with, for a widow.

Now we're reaching Melati's own statements, and I realise that that folder is so thick because her English was still so bad that they questioned her in her native language, with the help of an interpreter. The file contains both the transcripts of the actual interrogation in Indonesian, and translations into English.

"Oh, don't read it in English," Sherlock growls when I start doing exactly that, for obvious reasons. "The most important things always get lost in translation."

I've heard him request stranger things of me than this, and I've done stranger things in response to his requests, too. So I merely shrug.

"Alright. But I'm warning you. I know exactly one word of Indonesian, so don't let loose on me because I put the stress in the wrong places or something."

"What's the one word you know?" he asks, truly interested.

"'Pro'. Means 'Cheers'."

He snorts. "That would get you far in a Muslim country."

"It got me across Bali on a shoestring, back in the eighties," I reply, and privately relish the surprised look on his face. Then I embark on an absurd recitation.

There is something very melodious about that language, even though I must be torturing the words by how I'm making them come out of my mouth. But the fact that I have no idea at all what I'm reading has a strangely soothing effect. I was expecting it to irritate me. Instead, this is what meditating must feel like. Emptying your mind of all distractions, and giving yourself over to the flow. From around eight o'clock onwards, I can barely prop up my eyelids any longer.

Sherlock is remarkably quiet, too. He's listening with his eyes closed, and the seismograph hasn't registered any major commotion in the past hour. Minor unrest, of course, general unease, but no outright eruptions.

It is the calm before the storm.

The change comes on gradually, bit by bit, almost imperceptibly at first. I notice the small signs, but it's a while before I realise what they must mean.

The heavy tremor of his hands has subsided, but he can't keep them still. His fingers start wandering over the mattress, across the sheets and through his hair like spiders on forage. His legs don't twitch and jerk as badly any more, but they're not truly at rest either. He's beginning to fidget in a rhythm that I can't predict. He's still shivering with cold, though not as violently as before; but he's taken to scratching at his arms, as if to force some warmth into his skin.

This is no longer his body waging war on itself, not onslaught after onslaught of pure physical agony. This looks like it's coming from the inside. A much more subtle kind of disquiet.

Around nine, when it's become impossible to ignore, I stop reading and put the file down. He doesn't even seem to notice.

"Sherlock?" I ask after a moment, because I honestly can't tell. "Are you getting better, or are you getting worse?"

He doesn't reply straight away. "Both, I think," he says then, unhelpfully, but he seems rather at a loss himself.

"How's the pain?"

He shakes his head. "Not the point. Getting used to it, in fact." He attempts a wry grin, but his eyes seem to look right through me.

His fingers are wandering again. I feel an urge to tell him to stop, but I think better of it just in time. The last thing we need is me getting worked up because he's getting worked up.

"I – " he begins, then breaks off again, and his eyes flicker away from mine.

I watch him for another minute. Then I make a guess. "It's not about the body, is it?"

He gives me the ghost of an appreciative smile, as if to congratulate me on getting it at last.

"I told you so," he reminds me. All the same, he seems glad that he didn't have to say it himself.

Yes, he told me. Or tried to, this morning in the bath, when I was, again, too angry with him to listen properly. It would help a great deal if he didn't speak in riddles, of course. But if – as I suspect - riddles are the only way he knows how to talk about this at all, I'd better learn how to read them.

It's not about the body, he said, it's about the mind. It's a neurochemical derailment, and as long as you keep yourself aware of that, you're safe. And this, this is what he meant by it. He wasn't trying to defend his habit; he was trying to explain to me how he meant to break it. The derailment he was talking about is what I'm watching live right now. For three days, he's been fighting tooth and nail to keep the demons that are in firm control of his body out of his mind at least. But now he's slowly failing, for all it looks like.

Because he was right - chemistry is all it comes down to in the end. But it works both ways. That poison messes with your body, and you can tell yourself for a while that that's all it is – not truly your heart's dearest desire, just an automatic physical reaction with no deeper meaning. But it messes with your head as well. Because you don't need to believe in the healing power of Far Eastern relaxation techniques to understand that the base of your skull that separates your brain from the rest of your body isn't an iron curtain.

If the human brain is kept in a constant artificial state of happy oblivion, and then is suddenly deprived of the substance that kept it there, of course it will protest. And when you don't listen and oblige, it will revolt. And when you still don't listen, it _will _derail. It's a simple process, and one you can't stop just by telling yourself that it doesn't, or shouldn't, apply to you.

It was naïve to suppose that he was above it, just because he's above so many other things. He's probably held out longer than most others would have managed, and he's been better at bottling it up and not talking about it than most others would be, but no amount of self-control could keep him from feeling it at all.

"So, how far off the rails are we yet?" I ask him outright.

The answer I get is surprisingly straightforward, and frankly frightening. "Three wheels off, one still on." He tries to smile again, but it only comes out as a nervous twitch of his lips.

That's worse than I thought.

"Anything I should know? For when wheel number four comes off, I mean?"

He shrugs. "Just don't listen to me. Whatever I'll say, don't listen to me."

"Alright."

"I'm probably going to start hating you at some point. Don't take it personally."

"Alright."

"And when you think it really can't get any worse, it'll be as good as over."

"Fine."

"Then we should probably stop talking about it now and just get it over with."

I smile then, because that's just so him.

It's good to be warned, but it's not nice to have to sit there and watch him spiralling downwards, not knowing when we'll hit rock bottom, and knowing even less what that will be like.

He no longer wants me to read to him, but I don't want to leave him alone either. At first, we still talk a bit, in a desultory way, not about the Gibson case, certainly not about the past weeks, just about this and that, but he's never been good at that sort of thing anyway. By ten, he stops talking altogether. By eleven, I find myself wishing that he'd just blurt it out. Swallowing it all down will just make the fallout worse when the dam bursts at last.

And at some point just before midnight, we're there. He loses it completely, for about an hour, and it's one of the longest hours of my life. But in a twisted way, I'm glad. Because he still doesn't rant, doesn't rave, doesn't beg me to help him to another shot, doesn't revile me for not doing it, nothing of the sort. He _fights._ And that is something I know how to deal with.

It's a single moment that triggers it, one little touch that was meant to comfort and that has worked as comfort at least a dozen times already today. But suddenly, to his overtaxed senses, it must appear as a threat, or as an attack. He twists round on the bed, emerging from between the damp sheets with his red-rimmed eyes narrowed and his teeth bared, and he snarls at me in a barely human fashion. And then he's on me.

I do remember enough from my uniformed days to come out on top, although his current weakened state certainly helps. But he still takes a remarkably long time to capitulate. Starved and worn-out as he is, he keeps struggling against my hold, even though it must hurt tremendously. It's a long, long wait until the tension finally abates and his muscles slacken. I don't let go of him even then, not even when the last trace of resistance seems to have ebbed out of his body. He's been fine there, face down on the floorboards with my knee on his back, for the last three quarters of an hour. Surely he will survive ten minutes more. I want to be completely sure that he's not trying to trick me, and I'm not sure yet.

But slowly, it seems to penetrate the fog in his brain that most of the pain he's in right now really isn't necessary, and that it's up to him to end it. I can feel him shift under me, but feebly, no longer to throw me off. He's just trying to get away from the pressure now.

"If you're going to spend the whole night sitting on me," he grumbles then, "a few inches further up would be considerably more comfortable."

I laugh, and release him, knowing that he's back in the realm of relative sanity.

We quietly assess the damage we've done to each other. He flexes his arms carefully and twiddles his fingers to get the circulation going again. I rub the spot at the top of my head where a dull ache suggests that I've lost a whole tuft of hair. The skin of my hands and arms burns from a whole spider's web of scratches, and my chest and shoulders will probably be mottled with bruises tomorrow. If I looked closely, I'd probably even find teeth marks on my left hand. My colleagues from the domestic violence task force would have a field day if they could see the two of us now.

"You fight like a girl, Holmes," I reprove him.

He chuckles weakly. "So my brother always used to tell me."

He's not looking at me, still busy massaging the blood back into his hands. But he must feel how I've stiffened at the mention of that word. I've never, never heard him say anything about his family before, just like he never talks about anything else concerning his private life. I hold my breath, careful not to interrupt the flow, in case there is more to come.

He looks up at me then from where he's sitting on the floor, and smiles ruefully. "But he was seven years older than me, so no choice for me but to resort to the dirtier tricks."

"Well, that explains it." A silence. "He _was_, you said?" I venture then, aware that I'm walking on thin ice.

He shrugs, with such an expression of utter indifference that I back off double quick. Very thin ice indeed, and I really don't fancy a dip in freezing cold water.

A few minutes later, at his request, we're back in our usual places as if nothing has happened, he in bed and I in my chair with my feet propped comfortably against the mattress. And we're also back in atrociously mispronounced Bahasa Indonesia. It's better than a lullaby though, because not half an hour later, he's blessedly, uncomplicatedly asleep. I pad off to my own bed, reeling with fatigue. But I tell myself that if he was right – as he usually is - about the lowest point also being the turning point, we could well be out of the darkest part of the woods now.

#

Just before dawn, it transpires that we're still deep in the woods. We're merely entering a new area of hitherto uncharted territory. Of course I've dozed off and slept for hours, even though I swore to myself that it would only be a quick nap. But fighting one battle at a time for the triumph of the mind over the body is enough. I really don't have the energy for two.

I awake from the sound of footsteps down the hall, and I sit up abruptly, all senses alert. At the same time yesterday, I might have been hoping that my guest would just magically disappear again, and all the trouble he's brought into my life with him. But now, after I've already struggled with him through this hell of his own making for close on thirty-six hours, he's not going to go AWOL and let all our efforts go to waste if I can help it.

It registers with me then that what I heard was haste, not stealth, and that his destination was the bathroom, not the front door.

He was right to hurry, and I congratulate myself that he managed to reach the toilet just in time.

"Go away," he gasps between two bouts of desperate retching. At least this time, he doesn't even try to pretend that he's fine.

I hover in the open door, undecided. It doesn't seem right to leave him alone like this, but if this is something that he truly doesn't want me to see, I'd better not anger him by staying.

The next moment, he takes the decision out of my hands. His trembling fingers slip and lose their hold on the rim of the toilet bowl, he slumps down sideways, his head hits the tiled floor with a dull thud, and he truly passes out for a couple of moments.

When he comes to a minute or two later, and picks up exactly where he left off, I settle down behind him on the edge of the bathtub. When I lean forward, I can thread one of my arms under his and lock it across his heaving chest. That leaves my other hand free to hold back the damp strands of his hair that cling to his sweating face. He's still cold as ice to my touch, and shivering all over again. Wave after wave has him doubling over as if in an iron grip. Eventually, there is a long enough pause to get a word in.

"Are we still on schedule then?" I ask, and he presses his lips together and nods, head down and eyes closed, drawing deep steadying breaths through his nose.

"This is gonna be – " he gasps a moment later, "the main theme of – " another pause " – day four and five."

Four _and_ five? Something to look forward to, then.

"D'you think - " I begin, but we're already back in the routine then. With a sigh, I tighten my hold. I wish I had enough hands to hold my nose and block my ears, too.

It's already light outside when he straightens up at last with a deep groan. I help him to settle down with his back against the bath tub for support, and go and get him a water bottle.

"Small sips," I advise him, quite unnecessarily by the reproachful look he gives me. For a moment, I expect him to do the exact opposite, out of pure spite, but he knows better. Obviously, this phase isn't his favourite part of the whole procedure either.

A few minutes pass in silence. He drinks, and I watch, and wonder.

"Listen," I say after a while, "when you said you'd done this before - "

"Yes?"

"Where was that, and who did you do it with?"

He turns his head away, avoiding my eyes.

"In a cell," he says curtly, and closes his mouth again with a snap.

Not for the first time since he turned up at my place, I find myself wishing that there was a way to take a spoken word back.

But for the first time since, I'm truly and absolutely convinced that I'm doing the right thing, no matter how illegal it may be.

#

Distressing as it is, I find this part easier to bear than how it screwed with his mind yesterday. This is straightforward, mechanical. It's about ridding the body of toxic waste, not about wanting to add more. It's an urge that has to be acted on, but not a craving to be satisfied. There is nothing unpredictable about it, nothing roundabout. I'm beginning to see why he called it a picnic.

It's strangely boring as well. Yesterday, we were both running entirely on adrenaline, both poised for fight or flight every waking minute, except for the blessed spells of relief provided by a tubful of hot water or the voice of Melati Sudarmaputri. By silent accord, neither of us mentions what happened last night. But we seem to agree that we no longer need to be constantly on the alert today for the next new kind of cruelty. It makes us feel oddly without purpose. So, as was only to be expected, it's not long before Sherlock starts complaining.

"I need something to do," he mutters, still on his knees on the bathroom floor, while we're waiting for the next onset of nausea.

"You seem quite engaged at the moment, to be honest."

"My _brain_ needs something to do."

"More Indonesian?"

"No. Something more challenging, please."

Fine with me. Folder number three contains endless printouts of Neil Gibson's credit card details from the last couple of months before his death. He had six cards, issued by six different banks, and he used them all frequently. They, too, make for hours and hours of reading material, if of a less ethereal nature than Melati's statements.

Sherlock doesn't object to having row after row and column after column of figures read out to him, as if it's the most natural thing in the world to pass the time with when you're stuck in a bathroom with your head over a toilet bowl. I suspect that he's even taking a perverse kind of pleasure in it.

"Do concentrate," he reproves me when I slip up for the third time, swapping digits. "How am I supposed to deduce anything from this if you keep giving me the - "

" - wrong numbers?" he finishes two or three minutes later, as if he'd never needed a break.

Three quarters of an hour and quite a few similar breaks later, the letters and figures are dancing so wildly before my tired eyes that I break off in mid-transaction.

"Just when it gets interesting," Sherlock grumbles.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I find it remarkable that even a rich man like Gibson would spend more than two thousand pounds in six days on perfumes, jewellery and lingerie."

"Maybe he was secretly into that kind of stuff."

"Or he was trying to save his marriage," he replies in all innocence. I'm still behind his back, so he can't see my face. Not that it would change anything if he could.

"Or it was Svetlana," I suggest, "treating herself to something special with his money, if he had nothing else to give her anymore."

"You said these were his cards, she had her own." And, after a moment – "Right, go on."

"God, no, I need a break."

"You've just had one."

#

When we relocate to the bedroom at last, he's stiff from hours on the cold floor, and I'm stiff from holding him up with one arm and balancing the open file on the edge of the bathtub with the other. My spine creaks audibly when I untwist it from the most un-ergonomic position I've ever forced it into.

He crawls under the duvet, trying to get warm again, and I go and make a late breakfast for myself.

While the kettle boils, I check my phone. There's a text message from Judy, quick, to the point and devoid of all emotion: Dad doing surprisingly well, but mum grateful for help, will stay til Wednesday at least. There is also one from her mother, to the same purpose but ironically different in tone: So grateful you can spare her, wouldn't know what to do without you both, Ted and I send our love.

And there is one from MacDee, after three futile attempts to reach me directly. One of those attempts was late last night, when he must have assumed that I was already asleep, and when I was in fact busy grappling on the floor with my refractory guest. Two more attempts are from this morning, when I was busy holding the same man's head up over the toilet while he was vomiting his heart out. Good God, how am I ever going to explain any of that to anyone?

But MacDee's message drives all those considerations from my mind. 'Call me back if you feel up to it,' he writes. 'I've got news from GMP.'

He answers the phone on the second or third ring, and loses no time relaying the news to me. I can tell that something has unsettled him, and he's glad to get it off his chest.

"The copy of the warrant that the court put online," he explains, "was definitely faulty. Our colleague from the Manchester drug squad called them and asked them to fix the glitch, so he could at least see the actual thing. He learned something rather surprising that way."

"Well, spit it out."

"According to the database entry, the warrant was issued on the twenty-second of this month, by District Judge Thornbury, of the Manchester and Salford Magistrates' Court."

None of this is new, except for the name of the judge, and that can't matter much. "Yeah, I know. What about it?"

"Mrs Thornbury retired eight weeks ago."

#


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Note: **For all those who are not into football (soccer, for Americans): The offside rule is a constellation where you're not allowed to score a goal, depending on which players are positioned where on the field. It's a kind of touchstone - if you can explain what it means, and recognise it when it happens, you DO know all about football. If you can't, you reveal that you DON'T know the first thing about it.

* * *

It may be a coincidence, or it may be the sudden noise of an engine being started in the quiet of our street on a Saturday morning. But when I pass through the living room on my way back from breakfast, I feel a sudden urge to look out of the window again. I'm just in time to see the car that was parked across the road this morning depart. It was already there two hours ago when I got Sherlock something to drink, and there was a middle-aged lady sitting in it and refreshing her makeup in the rear view mirror. Now I watch it disappear round the corner, and from now on, it - and all its fellows – will stay away.

"Wrong direction," Sherlock waves it aside when I suggest breakfast to him. "Today's motto is out, not in." I don't insist. He's up for some ginger tea though - bless MacDee for the idea, because Sherlock really likes it - and he wants more credit card details, too.

By noon, we're done with HSBC and Barclays and have just started on the Royal Bank of Scotland, when he needs another spell in the bathroom.

I don't take any reading material with me this time. I'll have nightmares of endless rows of numbers tonight anyway; no need to spoil all my waking hours, too. Besides, it's much easier to hold him up with both arms.

"Right, tell me what you think," I encourage him when we get a few minutes' respite.

"Far too early," he mutters.

"No, I want to know." He's already got an unfair advantage over me where Melati's statements are concerned. And from the way he keeps nodding in satisfaction at some of the credit card items, he's seeing a pattern there, too, that I haven't spotted yet.

"Big mistake, Lestrade, theorising before - "

"Yeah, I know. But we're alone in my bathroom, nobody's listening, and it's the weekend – my _free _weekend - so we might as well take it easy. Come on."

"I'm not going to - "

"What, play Anderson?"

There is a vehement response to that suggestion, entirely non-verbal but very eloquent none the less. When it's over again, and I loosen my hold on him to let him get his breath back, he has the grace to laugh.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to be _that_ honest."

Loyalty forbids me to comment on that.

"Right, I still want to hear what your theory is," I nudge him again. "Tell me about the credit cards. Whenever Gibson pays for petrol, or for lunch or dinner at a restaurant, or for a plane ticket somewhere, you couldn't care less. But every time it's about perfumes or fancy underwear, you're happy."

"Well spotted," he comments drily.

"So what's behind that? Unless _you're_ the one who's secretly into that sort of thing, and just like to hear it mentioned?"

"What makes you so sure I'm not?"

"The fact that I've seen you in a tattered Sex Pistols t-shirt."

"What? Why?"

"Would look a bit odd with high heels, wouldn't it?"

He shrugs. "Not necessarily. It's called punk chic."

The things I'm learning. "If you say so. Alright. So we know that Gibson spent a lot - "

"We don't know that."

"Fine. We know that_ someone_ used Gibson's credit cards - "

"Better."

" - to shop for the kind of stuff that women like. But remember, there was no trace of any other woman in his life apart from his wife and of course the girl that looked after his kids."

That much we've already gathered from the files. No known affairs, not even casual contacts on business trips. He simply seems not to have had time for that sort of thing. His secretary: over sixty, known and trusted for ages. Not really mistress material. His PA: a young man, of no known inclinations of that sort at all.

"True," Sherlock agrees. "So it makes sense to assume that - "

" - this had to do with the two women that _were_ part of his life."

"Very good."

"So, which one?"

"Both, very likely. Did you notice the dates? No, of course you didn't."

"Oi._ I_ had to read all that stuff out aloud. All _you_ had to do was think."

"Yeah, well, to each his own."

I get to witness another emphatic illustration of that particular truth at this point, and it narrowly saves him from getting clipped around the ears.

"OK, what about the dates?" I ask when we're back on track.

"It started a week after Melati arrived, and went on all the time almost up to his death. Before that, nothing of the sort. At least with the two cards we've gone through so far."

I remember the Western Union transfers that Melati sent to her sister in Indonesia. "You mean that she nicked his cards to buy all that stuff? And then sold it again and sent the money home?"

"It's a possibility. Another one is that he bought the stuff for his wife because he had a reason - or thought he had a reason - to keep her sweet. And the third is that - "

" - he bought all that stuff for the _girl?"_

"Exactly."

"But what about the money transfers then?"

"Obvious, isn't it?"

"Well, what did she say about them in the interrogations?"

"I've no idea."

_"What?"_

"I said I've no idea. Don't drop me."

Because I almost do, and regain my hold on him only just in time for the next bout.

"But we've read all of the transcripts now," I object a few minutes later, still at a loss. "Or almost, except for the last page or two, when you fell asleep last night. And I even remember the term 'Western Union' popping up."

"Yes, so do I."

He shifts, and I let him settle down with his back against the tub for a few sips of water.

"But - " I ask while he drinks, neither willing nor quite able to believe it, "are you telling me that I've been reading you hours and hours of Indonesian, and you never understood any more of it than I did?"

He shrugs. "I never claimed that I would, did I?"

Bloody bastard.

I haven't said it out loud, but he puts down his bottle and pulls a comically sympathetic face. "Oh, don't look so hurt, Lestrade. It's given me an excellent grasp of the basic structures of Indonesian grammar, although I admit that the finer points of adverbial reduplication still escape me. And besides, it just sounded _so_ nice."

I do say it out loud then.

He gives me a look like a kicked puppy. "Seriously. It was a great mental exercise. You hardly ever get a cryptogram with such a large amount of samples to run your theories by. Very satisfying indeed. But as for the vocabulary, I'm afraid that I haven't made much progress, apart from a few obvious Chinese, Arabic and Dutch loan words."

"And 'cheers'," I remind him grumpily.

"And that didn't even turn up," he concedes.

We look at each other in silence for a moment. I know he doesn't do 'thank you', and he doesn't do 'sorry' either, but this is almost as good as if he'd said the actual words.

He's already shivering again, wanting his warm bed.

"Listen," I can't resist asking him, "when you did this last time - "

"Mmh?"

"Was that where you got the idea from?"

He looks back at me with a frown. "What idea?"

"That we coppers make the best detox buddies."

He stares at me for a moment, then grimaces as if he doubts my sanity, and finally cracks up laughing. I join in, and for minutes on end, we're both snorting with honest, uncomplicated laughter.

#

This odd sort of happiness stays with us for a long while. Even when we're back in the bathroom yet again a couple of hours later, the sounds and smells and the dead weight of that bundle of misery hanging in my arms seem to fade to the background. There is a simple but liberating joy in sharing a laugh over a silly little joke. It tides us over the rest of the afternoon until darkness falls.

That last trip to the bathroom wasn't the longest so far, but the most severe, and it's left Sherlock so drained and weak that he leans on my shoulder when I take him back to bed. By the time he's under the covers, his teeth are chattering. For a moment, he has me worried that I'm seeing a relapse into yesterday's horrors, but when I ask him, he assures me it's mere exhaustion. The fact alone that he admits to that would normally be worrying enough in itself, but everything's relative after all.

"Read me some more?" he asks in a small voice, but to be honest, I'm not up for improving his Indonesian any further, and I'm not up for feeding more numbers into his brain, either. Besides, there is something that I need to do in the next two hours, something that bears no delay, and that I'm not willing to trade for anything else.

"You try and sleep now," I tell him.

"Can't."

"Then watch telly, or something."

He turns his head on the pillow, just far enough to give me a look of supreme contempt, but he doesn't reply.

"Fine," I say. "But that's what I'll be doing, so if you need me, I'll be in the living room."

And that's where I am, ten minutes later, comfortably installed in my favourite armchair with a can of beer in my hand and my feet up, ready for the kickoff. Premier League, Arsenal vs. Liverpool, my Gunners against the Reds. It would take more than a mad genius taking quarter in my home for a three day detoxing stint to make me miss that.

So that's where Sherlock is, too, curled up on the sofa under his duvet and suckling like a baby on his bottle of three parts water and one part cat piss. We're economising now. Just quickly popping into Tesco for fresh supplies, or even any supplies, is something that normal people with normal lives do. Tonight, we live off more dry toast and a burger-and-chips from the corner shop.

"I'm not obsessed," I told him before he came to join me, to make that look on his face go away. "But I need a break, and anyway, it's part of our cover story. If I can't reiterate that match minute by minute on Monday, all my colleagues will become extremely suspicious. What should I tell them I did instead, when they ask?"

"The truth?"

"That I was hiding a fugitive from justice in my spare bedroom?"

"That you were busy solving the Gibson case. I thought you had a reputation for taking your job seriously?"

"Not when it comes into conflict with watching my team kicking the Reds' arses."

"And you said you weren't obsessed."

He's quiet now, thankfully. His eyes are fixed on the TV screen, except when he nicks chips from my half-emptied takeaway box, and he doesn't comment at all for the first ten minutes, and then only to remark that green is a good colour. It takes me a moment to get what he means, since the teams are in red and blue respectively.

At minute twelve, the amazing Thierry Henry is on the best way to the 1-0, when the whistle stops him short.

"He seemed to be doing well," Sherlock says, and I look at him in astonished amusement.

"He was offside." How could he have missed something so obvious?

"What side?" he asks back, and now I'm having a hard time not to crack up laughing.

"Are you telling me that I know something that you don't?"

"Why d'you think I asked?" comes his response, straight out of the sulking corner. But that's as good a place for him to be as any, if it leaves me to watch the remaining seventy-eight minutes in peace.

"Work it out," I tell him, and turn back towards the screen.

I've never seen it that way before, but if you look at a football match without the eyes of a fervent supporter, and without a firm grasp of the rules and the technique involved, it has its own mesmerising quality. The effect is, in fact, probably not so different from having something read to you in a beautiful language that you don't understand. Or at least that's what it seems to feel like to Sherlock. At minute twenty-seven, he's complaining that he can see why our police forces are in such a deplorable state, if this is how their members dull their minds in their free time. At minute twenty-nine, he's fast asleep.

When I get up at halftime to stretch my legs and get myself another beer, I also find a towel to put under his head and a bucket to put on the carpet next to him.

"Don't puke on my sofa, too, Holmes," I mutter. "It's new. Judy's gonna kill me."

"She is anyway," comes the muffled answer, and he turns over to face the wall, all of it very likely without waking up.

#

I'm the one who wakes up with a crick in my neck and my feet getting cold, almost two and a half hours after the final whistle. I remember that; I remember turning the volume down a little then for the after-match analysis and interviews, because Sherlock was still asleep on the sofa. I don't remember much else after that. Now the room is in darkness, the TV is off, and Sherlock is gone. But the narrow lines of light around the edges of the door of his bedroom tell me that he hasn't gone far.

He's sitting up in bed, with his legs drawn up and one of the Gibson files leaning against his knees. "It's as we thought," he says without raising his head when I look in. "It's the same pattern with the Royal Bank of Scotland and with Lloyd's. The other two cards he used only for business-related expenses, not privately." He looks up then. "Weren't you sleeping?"

"Well, so were you. But now it almost looks like you mean to start earning your keep."

He gives me a lopsided grin. "You just have no head for numbers, Lestrade. I find it distracting to have to watch out for your slip-ups all the time. The moment we're back to words, you take over again."

"God, not tonight." He might still be running on snatches of one or two hours of sleep at a time, but I really can't do that, not for days on end.

"See you tomorrow, then," he dismisses me, in the same light tone that MacDee would use on a nice, normal evening after work, when we part company outside our favourite pub and both head home.

I hesitate. "Call me, alright? When -"

"When I _need _anything?" he quips. "So you can thrash it out of me again?"

"_You_ started it, you dork."

"True. But you gave as good as you got."

"Better, I hope."

"Only just. Good night."

"Good night."

I've never meant that more seriously.

#


	8. Chapter 8

Sunday dawns just like Saturday did. It's so much of a déjà-vu that for a moment, I feel like we've been transported back in time.

I also don't feel any better than yesterday morning. I slept like a log, but it was a knock-out kind of sleep, as if someone had pulled the plug. I wake from it, not relaxed and refreshed, but with a massive headache.

"God, I hate this," Sherlock mutters when the current spell of nausea seems to be over, and he settles down against the bath tub again to get his breath back. He's still shaking with cold from head to foot, too.

"Hear hear," I grumble back at him. "I could never have told, seeing how you keep at it."

Of course I know he can't help it. It isn't his fault. But then again, it is. And it's endlessly frustrating to think that we haven't made any progress at all in the past twenty-four hours.

"If _you_ know how to make this stop, it's about time you told me," he snaps.

"Shouldn't have nicked my chips, maybe."

"Stop complaining. They were soggy and cold, and too much saturated fat isn't good for you at any rate."

Q.E.D., as the wise men say.

"Here." I hold out a mug to him.

I went to find his water bottle when we got our first short break, but when I came back with it, he told me he wanted something warm instead. In the kitchen, I discovered that we'd run out of ginger tea, and resorted to the closest equivalent that I could find. According to the label, some Ayurvedic nonsense from Judy's favourite health food store, but it said on the package that there's ginger in it, too.

Now he's sniffing at it suspiciously, and when he's taken a sip, he pulls a face as if I meant to poison him. "What's that?"

"It's got ginger in it."

"Yes, and a disgustingly large amount of cinnamon as well. Clashes horribly with the liquorice root and the aniseed." He makes a move as if to empty the mug straight into the toilet.

Jesus. We're not only making no progress, we're regressing. This isn't a three year old, this is just insufferable.

"It's called 'Sweet Harmony Spice Mix'," I inform him curtly, "and you could certainly do with a good dose of sweet harmony right now."

"Who drinks that stuff normally, I wonder?" he asks back, narrowing his eyes.

"It's Judy's."

"Precisely. So don't tell me it helps."

I can feel the blood rise into my face. I've let him invade my home, and I've let him make ridiculous demands on my time and my energy and my patience, but that is going too far. "Listen, if you think you can - "

"Oh, stop it," he grunts, as if_ he_ had a right to be annoyed. "It's not my fault that those washouts of yours got steamrollered 3-0 by the Liverpudlians last night. Don't take it out on me, alright?"

"I'm_ this_ far away from it, just so you know!"

We glare at each other for a moment.

"And the Reds playing short, too," he mutters then.

I can feel my right hand curl into a fist. "You asking for another black eye, Holmes?"

"Yeah, sure," he sneers. "Just the one offends my sense of symmetry. And more pain would be lovely right now, so don't hold back."

I'm not sure why I'm making my headache worse by slamming the bathroom door shut behind me, but slam shut it does with a loud bang. And before I can even start wondering whether it's a good idea or not, I've put on my trainers and a fleece, and I'm out of the door and heading down the street.

#

The cool morning air on my face and in my hair feels sharp and fresh, and a sudden gust of wind sweeps me along as I break into a trot. Three minutes further on, I've crossed the main road, and I'm in the reserve.

It's been ages since I last came here for a run. It was high summer then. The grass was parched and yellow, the pool down at the bottom of the slope greenish and stagnant. I remember being grateful for every stretch of the path that was overhung by trees, providing shade. Now the few leaves that remain on the branches are brown, the grass is dark and sodden with rain, and the surface of the pool reflects the slate grey sky. The lawns are strewn with broken twigs and other debris from last night's strong wind. It didn't bring me fully conscious, but now I seem to remember hearing it rattling at the bedroom window.

The pace I set at first is too ambitious, so I slow down to something that's easier to sustain after the first few hundred yards. This feels even better than I hoped - moving along in that steady rhythm, every tread landing firmly on the solid ground of the gravel path, one after the other, with no need to think ahead and watch out for landmines and hidden pitfalls.

Except for an elderly man walking his dog and a young family down by the pond, feeding the ducks, I'm alone. That's good, too.

Twenty minutes later, I come out on the opposite ridge, on the far side of the pond, and I pause under my favourite tree. It's a single, solitary oak that looks like it was already here when everything around was still a wilderness, not just a little island of green in a sea of brick and concrete. You can see its massive roots spreading in all directions, some of them below the grass, some of them half-exposed to the elements, and many more of them invisible. They've kept that tree upright for a very long time, through all sorts of weather and storms. It's good to know that they'll keep it anchored and stable there for maybe centuries more, no matter how the wind may shake it and tear at it in its fury.

Just when I'm beginning to get cold, with the wind chilly on my sweaty skin, the phone in my pocket rings. I let it ring until it stops. Then I feel guilty, and take it out to at least check the caller ID.

It was MacDee, and he was calling from the office landline.

I back down the slope a couple of steps, or he won't be able to hear my voice for the wind. Then I return the call. He picks it up immediately.

"Just wanted to hear how you are," he greets me in a rather falsely cheerful tone.

"Bit tired," I answer truthfully as I amble further down the path. "Don't _you_ have the weekend off, too?"

He did sound too cheerful though for another disaster to have happened.

"Yeah, I do," he confirms. "Just showing Cat around a bit." There is a short silence. "Oh, and while I was here anyway -"

"Don't try."

"Alright. It's gone. From the database."

"What?"

"It's gone. Not just the warrant. The whole entry. Deleted, like it never happened."

"Did you ask why?"

"Couldn't reach anyone there this morning."

"Right. You take Cat somewhere nice now and try and forget all about it. We'll sort it out tomorrow."

"Thanks," he says, with such honest relief that it makes me squirm with guilt. He really doesn't deserve to be caught up in this maze of lies and half-truths.

Yesterday morning, when MacDee told me that the warrant had been - apparently - issued by a judge who was retired, and thus neither authorised nor technically equipped to do anything of the sort, that seemed downright sinister to me. But then I convinced myself that I was seeing things, and dismissed the issue as just one more technical glitch. Those procedures are highly automatised these days, and it's so easy to cause a lot of confusion by ticking a wrong box on a form or selecting a wrong name or initial from a list. And so I managed to push it to the back of my muddled mind.

Now it's coming back with a vengeance.

I debate the wisdom of it with myself for the whole of ten seconds, then I dial another number.

Judging by the background noises when he answers, Athelney Jones must be at a sports ground with his three boys. I briefly wonder why he ever feels the need to think of other men as lucky bastards.

I apologise for calling him about work on a Sunday, then I come straight to the point.

"Remember I asked you about someone the other day?"

"Oh, Sherlock Holmes?" This time, he clearly doesn't need to refresh his memory. "Yeah. I heard, of course."

Well, thank you, Philip.

"Listen. When you picked him up, all those times, and the charges were always dropped again – "

"Yes?"

"Did you ever get the feeling that there was anything – anything irregular about that? Like, somebody was meddling, pushing things in a particular direction?"

He pauses to think for a moment. "Not really," he says cautiously. "Just the Crown Prosecution Service being its usual disappointing self. You know how they love to bin hours and days of our work on the grounds of some piffling formality."

Don't I know what he's talking about. "You sure though? Nothing that felt odd, nothing unexpected about it?"

"Hmm. Now that you mention it – there was something odd about that last time. When we actually nicked him. I remember that he was refused bail for days on end, and then when it finally came, it made no sense, because nothing had happened in between that could have made the judge change his mind. But other than that, no, nothing."

And this is not what I was looking for, because that delay, whatever its cause, of course didn't work in Sherlock's favour. Doubly and triply not, considering what he was going through at that time, too.

None of this makes sense, and it's maddening.

#

When I emerge out of the quiet green onto the road again, half an hour later, my stomach is rumbling. I need a shower and dry clothes, but I need a coffee and breakfast more, so I turn left and make my way down to the high street. The little café on the corner is already open for business, and the smell of fresh baking that wafts towards me when I open the door makes me go weak at the knees.

"You're an early bird, for a Sunday," Jia, the proprietress, remarks with a smile when I order a coffee and - out of pure spite - some of her cinnamon buns. They're always really good though, too.

"Yeah, I know. I'm on holiday."

"Oh, nice."

She hands me my change, and I sit down in the window, with my breakfast on the table in front of me and my mind far away.

An hour and another coffee later, I've pondered all the possibilities at least twice, and I'm still not sure what to do.

I'm a stone's throw away from our local police station. If I'd come down here straight away, two hours earlier, nothing would have been easier than just walking in there and arranging for someone to take him off my hands at last. If he's already spitting venom again, he can't be that bad any more. Let him finish the second half of this where he did it before. He'd get the food and drink that he needs, and the doc on duty would check on him twice a day, and the rest of the time, he could take out his vile moods on the empty air, for all I'd care.

Only that won't work any more. As far as I know, he's a free man now, at liberty to go wherever he likes and to do whatever he pleases.

So I just kick him out now, do I? To go, where? Back into the gutter that he's only just struggled out of, hanging on by the skin of his teeth until he crash-landed in the one place where he thought he'd be safe?

And besides, what if I tell him to get lost now, and then find out tomorrow morning that whatever went wrong with their IT, Manchester is still looking for him on an indictable charge?

What I end up doing is buying a selection of Jia's sandwiches for lunch, and a large piece of her impossibly delicious carrot cake for dessert. Then I head home.

The flat is eerily quiet when I get back. I put the bag from Jia's onto the kitchen table, then check the bathroom where I left Sherlock earlier. It's empty. The window is half-open to let in some fresh air, and the floor is spotlessly clean.

When I push open the door to the spare bedroom, a peaceful sight greets me. Sherlock is back in bed, with an arm hanging over the edge of the mattress and the hand resting lightly on an open page of one of the Gibson files, on the floor next to the bed. He must have fallen asleep leaning over it and reading in it. The page is one I haven't seen before, all of it in Cyrillic script.

I put the duvet that has slipped down onto the floor over him again, then close the door softly and go to have my overdue shower.

#

I should be immune to any more surprises on a day like this, but he sleeps until after noon. That's the longest period of sleep he has managed since he came here.

I'm in the kitchen, unpacking the sandwiches, when he resurfaces at last. I turn at the sound of bare feet on the floorboards, and there he is in the open door.

"I've made tea, if you want any." He points at the pot on the worktop. "Proper tea." He smiles tentatively.

"Yeah, I saw. But it's cold by now," I say, and want to kick myself for it a moment later.

He glances at the clock on the wall. "Oh, right." He looks crestfallen.

"Never mind," I hastily try to repair the damage. "I'll just put it in the microwave."

"That will taste vile though."

Serves me right.

He walks over to the kitchen table and sits down in one of the chairs, tucking his right foot under his left leg.

"You've had news," he states, unsettling me considerably.

"I have," I reply cautiously. "It's quite amazing, the things that will happen when you stay away from the office for more than a day."

He gives me a faint grin. "As in, all problems solve themselves overnight?"

"How do you know it's _good_ news?"

He puts his head to one side and regards me with narrowed eyes. "Both good and bad," he says then.

I snort. "Why don't you just admit that you don't know which one?"

"You don't know either," he points out, frighteningly accurate.

I'm inches away from just sitting down and telling him the whole story. It's an option that, strangely enough, I didn't even consider when I went over the possibilities back at Jia's. It would be so easy to just ask him outright what happened in Manchester to get the law interested in him, and what might have happened now to get it disinterested again so quickly. He hates direct questions like that, of course, but if anyone holds the key to this mystery, it's him, and it's time I insisted that he hands it over.

But I don't do it.

Maybe because he looks so tired. The insomnia of the past days is truly taking its toll now.

Or maybe because he's so - what a strange word to use for him - biddable now. That edge in his voice that drove me out of my own house this morning is completely gone. He may just be too knackered by now to squabble with me. But he's also done his best to make up for having been obnoxious earlier on. If he was just exhausted, he wouldn't have cleaned up after himself, and he wouldn't have made tea for two.

Is he maybe even afraid of pissing me off too badly? Does he really believe that I might have him relocated to a cell after all, if he makes himself too much of a pain in the rear?

Whatever it is, something happened here while I was gone, and I'm not going to endanger that fragile balance by telling him that if he wants to go, there's nothing to stop him anymore. He's doing fine here; by all means let him believe that there is no alternative. It's not kind, and it's not honest, but it's efficient. And he's been very economical with the truth himself lately, whenever it didn't suit his purpose to be frank with me. Well, two can play at that game.

"Talking of problems solving themselves overnight," I try to steer the conversation into less dangerous waters, "I saw you were back with the Gibsons again. Anything new?"

"Not really. I've known it for a while now."

"Known what, exactly?"

"How he died."

"What?"

"How he died. Aren't you listening?"

"You've solved the case?"

"Of course I have."

I groan. "God, no."

He gives me a hurt look. "Didn't you want me to?"

"Yes, but not that quickly. What are we going to do all day now?"

"Have lunch?"

"All day?"

"It's a start, isn't it?"

"Are you serious?"

He smiles. "Yes. Ravenously, starvingly serious."

#

"So was it suicide after all?" I ask him across the kitchen table a few minutes later, chewing on a bacon and egg sandwich.

He stirs his instant noodles with his spoon. "Oh, suicide," he mutters without looking up, sounding annoyed. "Suicide is overrated."

I freeze.

He eats a spoonful, then another. When I still don't move, he looks up at me with a frown. "Anything wrong?"

"No, no," I stammer a little stupidly. "No, it's fine. Good news, actually." Because it is. And I'm not thinking about Neil Gibson right now.

His mind is already back on his lunch. "And now I really need a knife and fork," he declares, putting his spoon down. "These things are impossible to eat with dignity otherwise."

He's a funny one, keeping me busy cleaning up his various messes for three days, and then standing on his dignity when it comes to a couple of soup stains. On a t-shirt that isn't even his own.

I point over my shoulder. "Top drawer. And you could have had a sandwich."

He gives me a disdainful look, but then he gets up to find what he needs.

"So who killed him?" I ask when he's back in his place.

"I can tell you who didn't."

"And that's all?"

"I thought that was all you were meant to find out. You should be grateful. I'm saving your brain from getting swamped by unnecessary information. Which is something I've pointed out to you before as being detrimental to the – "

"Alright, alright. Don't tell me. I'll guess."

"And now I'm really not surprised any more."

"At what?"

"At how you stumble through your investigations, if guesswork is the basis of your conclusions."

"Oi!"

"Well, _guess _away then."

"It was the KGB," I suggest, thinking back to the Russian documents that he's been studying.

"There's no KGB any more, Lestrade."

"Then the whatever-they-changed-their-name-to."

"It's called the FSB. And don't be absurd."

"Oh, come on. It's not that far-fetched. Gibson, with all his Russian oil deals – we're talking about the nineties here. That country was worse than the wild West back then. Must have been easy to make enemies."

"It was clearly an inside job."

"Right. The gardener, then."

"What? Why?"

"It's a classic."

He rolls his eyes.

"Alright, the butler."

"They had no butler."

"Colonel Mustard, in the billiard room, with the candlestick."

"For God's sake - "

"Are you telling me you didn't love that game as a kid?"

A strange expression passes across his face for a moment, one which I could swear was nostalgia if it wasn't quite so bitter.

Then he pushes away the empty plastic cup, and his eyes fix greedily on the bag from Jia's that's still on the table, and in it, carefully wrapped in white paper, the dessert. "I get the cake."

#


	9. Chapter 9

He gets _half_ the cake, and that only after a fierce argument.

I teased him that he would get all of it if he could tell me what kind it was. He looked at the wrapped package for a whole minute, as if he meant to x-ray it with his red-rimmed eyes, then told me that it was either chocolate, sticky toffee or carrot, but that he'd have to be flatmates with me for at least a week to narrow it down further than that. To which I said "God forbid" and let him have the half. But only after making him admit that technically, he hadn't earned more than a third.

"Right, about Gibson's death," I ask him half an hour later, when he's back in bed. "Three options as well, or a definite answer on that one?"

"Definite answer, of course."

"Good. I was getting worried."

He gives me a very reproachful sidelong glance, then stretches out his long legs, links his hands behind his head and half-closes his eyes.

"Conclusion number one," he begins. "Not an accident."

"Right." I lean back in my desk chair and open my notebook. I'm the one who will have to write the report for the Superintendent after all, so I'd better not miss any important details. "Why not?"

"Because it would have been the wrong sort of accident. We've seen from the medical records that he sometimes forgot to inject himself, and more often couldn't be bothered. He was notoriously noncompliant. There's no reason to assume that that attitude would suddenly change, to the point of becoming fatally overeager not to miss a dose."

"Even under the influence?"

"Not all that much influence. According to the records, there was quite a degree of habituation. That blood alcohol level would probably have resulted in an impressive loss of control and of memory if it had been you or me, but not for someone as used to it as Gibson was. If it had been me, I mean. Not sure about you."

"Hey!"

He just grins.

I was wrong when I thought that we had made no progress. He's still ghostly pale, and desperately tired by now, but his face isn't as strained and taut any more. And he hasn't only eaten, and slept, and not been sick for hours - he's also not asked to have a bath all day yet. Going by the deep sighs of relief that he heaved, every time he got into the hot water yesterday and on Friday, that means the pain is beginning to ebb away now as well. The only thing that hasn't changed are the cold chills, but they barely interrupt the flow. When they come, he just wraps the covers more tightly around himself and keeps talking anyway. The seismograph has been decommissioned.

It makes me smile. He discourses, and I take notes. At long last, we're reverting to the natural order of things.

It's also a scene like the cartoon of a therapy session, with him lying down and talking and me listening, pen in hand. I'm about to tell him so, to share the laugh with him. Then I realise that it isn't funny, because a therapy session is exactly what this is, if an unusual one.

"Conclusion number two - " he continues, and pauses to clear his throat. His deep voice is still a little husky.

" - suicide is overrated," I break out with before I can think better of it.

"Exactly," he confirms, completely unmoved.

I really can't seem to unsettle him on that count. That's all the answer to my questions that I'll ever get, but also all the answer that I need.

"Conclusion number three - "

"No, hang on," I interrupt him. "I want some details on this issue, too. I know there was nothing in Gibson's medical records to imply depression, but sometimes, these ideas -" I break off, sensing that I'm on dangerous ground again, this time quite unintentionally.

" – seem to come out of nowhere, you mean?" he suggests, still not put out in the least. I secretly heave a sigh of relief at his light tone. "Yes, of course, but they rarely come so spontaneously as to explain two separate injection marks. One to save your life, one to take it? Within minutes of each other?"

Fair enough.

"Right. Conclusion number three: You lot let yourself be blinded by stereotypes to a worrying degree."

"What? Why?"

"Because your whole investigation, back then, was centred around the idea that Melati Sudarmaputri was a poor, desperate third world girl who would either steal from or sleep with a rich western man to better her and her family's fortunes. And who would kill him when she was either found out by him, or ditched by him, or both. But when Scotland Yard failed to find any convincing proof of either, they turned into a bunch of sullen little kids, threw over the whole game board and declared that they were unable to find any other definite explanation for his death either. And never again bothered to really get at the truth."

"Well, thank God we've got you aboard now to teach us all to behave like grown-ups. We may not have seen that pattern in the credit card records, but it only confirms our theory from back then, doesn't it? She did send her sister all that money. It had to come from somewhere."

"You know what she said about it when you asked her?"

"Not 'cheers', at any rate."

"She said that she gave it to her sister to donate to a children's hospital back home."

I snort. "And you call it 'blinded by stereotypes' that we didn't buy that nonsense."

"If you'd invested just ten minutes in a Google search, you'd have found out very quickly that it was completely true."

"What?"

"Yes." He shifts on the bed for a more comfortable position. "Maryanti Sudarmaputri, Melati's older sister, is a lawyer in Bandung who specialises in family law. But she's also, and has been since it was founded in 1997, the president of a religious foundation which runs the Jayapura Children's Hospital, in the notoriously poor and war-torn Indonesian province of Irian Jaya. Their bookkeeping is as accurate as you could wish, and in their annual report for 1998, which is still online, you will find several donations to that noble cause by a certain Miss Sudarmaputri the Younger. The sum tallies exactly with that of the Western Union transfers."

"Jesus Christ."

"Not all that surprising, really. Oh, you mean _that_," he adds as his eyes follow mine to my computer, which, for some reason, is sitting in plain view on the desk next to the stack of case files. It didn't catch my eye until now, because that's where it normally is; but I'm quite sure that last night, it was still locked in the top drawer of my bedside cabinet.

"I did contemplate waking you up to ask," Sherlock explains, not looking guilty in the least. "But then I decided that you might mistake my motives, and worry needlessly."

Selling his impudence as a kindness, is he? "Very considerate of you."

"Anyway," he continues, unruffled, "Melati comes from a family of doctors and lawyers – her father is a retired professor of law at Bandung Islamic University – and now she's getting married to a man who is both a high-ranking military officer and a diplomat. She isn't Cinderella, you know. She never needed that money, nor wanted it even. "

"But where did it come from, then? Are you telling me that's all online, too?"

"No, that's all in the file, and you've read it to me yourself."

"So we _are_ back with the theory that she stole Gibson's credit cards to buy all that luxury stuff. Only not for herself, but out of a weird sort of Robin Hood motivation, to take from the rich and give to the poor?"

"You disappoint me, Lestrade."

"Yeah, is there anyone who ever doesn't?"

He shakes his head at me. "If you used someone else's credit cards for the purpose of making the most money in the least conspicuous way, would you buy and sell jewellery, of all things? That's the type of goods that are hardest to sell again privately without arousing suspicion. You'd probably go for electronic gadgets or something of that sort. But jewellery, or designer underwear? No."

"So Gibson did buy that stuff himself."

"Yes."

"And gave it to her?"

"For all we know, yes. And she got rid of it again as quickly as she could. The jewellery she probably pawned, and the other stuff she put up on Ebay. They've got a member named 'melati79' who joined in September 1998, got positive feedback for twenty-eight transactions over the following two months, and then never bought or sold a thing there again. They don't keep the details of the transactions for that long, but the dates fit, and the name probably isn't a coincidence either."

"And then she gave all that money to charity. Like it was earned in a dirty way, or something."

"It certainly was, in her eyes."

I groan. "You tell me to watch out for stereotypes, and now you're saying that they did have an affair after all? He rewarded her with those presents, and when she started feeling guilty about it, she got rid of them?"

"In the interrogations, she was adamant that they were never involved in that way."

I snort again. "Of course she'd deny it."

"Why? Seriously. The man was dead. Why would she still make up silly lies that that money came from some charitable compatriots whom she met at the mosque, and got interested in the hospital project? Not wise, is it, to tell lies like that when you've got a murder charge hanging over you."

"Perfectly logical, when you're the guilty one. You'd lie like a trooper to get off the hook."

"But isn't the really interesting question why I would, in the first place, want to sleep with a married, overweight, alcoholic businessman who was old enough to be my father at all?"

"Very funny."

"No, really. If it seems absurd to you that _I_ would do such a thing, why would it be more logical for a well-educated nineteen year old Muslim girl from a well-to-do Indonesian upper class family to do it?"

We look at each other for moment. Then I draw the obvious conclusion, and it makes me grimace with disgust. "You mean he forced her?"

"You asked her that, too. She denied it absolutely."

"Afraid?"

"Of what? He was dead."

"Ashamed?"

"Ah. Now we're getting somewhere." He pushes himself up on his elbow and gestures towards the stack of files on the desk. "Look at pages thirty-eight and thirty-nine in volume four, and tell me what you see."

Page thirty-eight is a family photograph in a transparency - a professional traditional portrait shot of Neil Gibson in a suit, his wife in a stylish red dress, and their two little sons, all smiling a little fixedly into the camera. It's the kind of photograph that you put on the mantelpiece in a silver frame, except the frame is missing. The picture must have been taken years before Gibson's death – the younger of the boys was still a baby, sitting on his mother's lap. It's a bit faded, too.

Page thirty-nine is a photo of Neil Gibson's two boys at the playground, years later. It's just a snapshot. The camera caught the two of them with broad grins and ruffled hair, as if they'd just been play-fighting, and between them, squatting on the grass with one arm around either of the kids and hugging them both to her sides, there is Melati Sudarmaputri, in a comfortable hooded jumper and with a radiant smile on her soft, round face.

The labels on the transparencies say that both photographs were secured from the bedroom in which Gibson slept, and died, on November 3rd, 1998. They were both in a drawer of his bedside cabinet, along with an empty frame that probably used to hold the older of the pictures.

"I can see a man who loved his children," I think out loud. "He may not have spent much time with them, but they were clearly on his mind."

"Good," Sherlock nods. "What else?"

"Not much else. The kids are the only unifying factor."

"Remarkable," he scoffs. "You_ never _see the wood for the trees, do you? That fact _is_ all you need to know." I give him an annoyed look, but he ignores it. "What you see, or should be able to see," he elaborates, "are two families. The one that he had, and the one that he wanted. Look at them. Not the kids. As you pointed out so very perceptively, they're the same in both pictures. But look at the women. Now imagine you're given the choice. Not difficult, is it? Even for a man with below-average testosterone levels like Gibson, it wouldn't be hard to see the difference between what he had and what he was missing."

He's right. I flick back and forth between the two pictures, and the contrast between the two women could not be greater.

Svetlana Gibson looks like you'd imagine a nouveau riche woman to look like - peroxide blonde hair in an elaborate do, designer dress, jewellery, heavy makeup, inch-long red nails. But underneath that, she was - can _getting old_ be the right word, for a woman with a baby on her lap? She can't have been over forty then, but her skin was the bad skin of a chain smoker, carefully hidden under too much paint, and there were hard, deep lines around her mouth where probably a beauty surgeon had failed to smooth the effects of her latest face-lift into something more natural. It's in her smile, too – close up, it's a mere grimace, like a mask.

Melati, on the other hand, with no makeup at all, her long black hair in a careless bun and dressed as if for the sports ground, radiates a kind of genuine warmth and vitality that I can see no trace of in Svetlana's face. There is nothing artificial in the boys' obvious happiness and affection for her, either.

"Now take the photos out, and put them on top of each other," Sherlock instructs me. I do, and they're exactly of a size, even though one is in portrait and the other in landscape format. I notice something else, too. By its quality, and by the little line of number code on its back, the photo of Melati and the boys is a proper print from a photo shop, too. But on both sides, left and right, someone has inexpertly cut a bit of it away with a pair of scissors. The edges are slightly irregular there.

"Turn that one over again," Sherlock continues. On closer inspection, the line of number code includes a date. 1998-11-01. Three days before his death. The same day when Melati asked her agency to have her relocated to a new family as quickly as they could.

I look up at Sherlock. He's smiling. "There you are." He slumps back onto the bed, as if that piece of information concludes the matter, and closes his eyes.

"What happened on the first of November, then?" I ask after a moment of silence.

Without opening his eyes, he waves his hand at the two photos I'm still holding in my hand. "Gibson made a mistake. He took his wife out of the picture, literally, and took the first definite step to replace her permanently with another woman. Even though this other one didn't fit in the frame. And he either informed his wife of it; or she happened on the fact by chance and drew her own conclusions. At any rate, on the third day after that, he was dead."

"His _wife_ killed him?"

"Mmh."

I pinch the bridge of my nose with my fingers. The headache is coming back now. "She was the most fervent supporter of the accident theory."

Sherlock opens his eyes again. "She wasn't stupid. It was a God-send that suspicion fell on Melati rather than on her, but she wasn't going to overdo it by actively trying to incriminate the girl when there was no real evidence against her. That would have made it obvious even to the Metropolitan Police Service that she was an interested party, rather than just a grieving young widow."

"But it makes no sense. What did she gain by killing him?"

"More than she stood to gain from a divorce, at any rate."

"What do you mean?"

"Look at page eighty-eight in volume five."

A moment later, I'm looking at the same document in Cyrillic script that Sherlock fell asleep over this morning. I remember noticing the official seal at the bottom of the page.

"What is it?"

"Their marriage certificate. They got married in Russia, presumably to avoid visa trouble when she came to join him in the UK. The date is barely two months before their first child was born. The place is Noyabrsk, a godforsaken provincial oil town in subarctic Western Siberia. And the occupation given for the bride translates as 'waitress'. Even if we don't read that as a blatant euphemism - if you absolutely insist that there must be a Cinderella in the story, it's her. Not Melati."

"You mean Svetlana was afraid that she was going to be sent back into the ashes, when her prince had found a new lady?"

"Exactly."

"She'd have received a princely pay-off."

"But she wasn't married long enough to entitle her to an independent residence permit in the UK."

"Her kids were British citizens."

"Which would have ceased to matter once she'd lost the inevitable dirty custody battle. After that, no money in the world could have given them back to her, or even kept her close enough to see them grow up."

I shake my head. "But you said that there actually was nothing going on between Melati and Gibson at all."

"That's the irony, yes. _He_ must have been absolutely infatuated with the girl. She didn't return his feelings, but he was either too used to getting his own way, or too irrational, to mind that. He still believed that they had a future together, and kept trying to win her heart."

"By buying her."

"Yes. It was probably the only way he knew how to win over a woman. It must have worked well enough with Svetlana, at least to start with. But with Melati, it didn't only not work, it alienated her so badly that she finally asked her agency for a transfer. He must have thought that she'd come round eventually if he kept flattering her enough, but she was mortified by his attentions. He wanted her to feel like a princess; it made her feel like a whore."

"What makes you so sure that she felt so strongly about it?"

"The fact that she kept denying that anything of the sort ever happened, even after the man was dead and she was being charged with killing him. The mere idea of hooking up with him must have gone not only against her personal liking, but also completely against all her moral, cultural and religious convictions. Remember, she was from an educated family who let their daughters attend university and even let them go abroad on their own, but she took her religious duties very seriously."

"How do you know that?"

"She asked for breaks in the interrogations to observe her prayer times. So, the concept of being the lover of a married man, whose children she'd been hired to look after and keep happy, must have been so alien and so disturbing to her that in the end, she knew no help for it but to run away. She was never going to become the cause for breaking that family up, no matter how ready to be broken up it might have been without her help anyway. We don't know just how far he went in pressing his attentions on her, but something happened on or just before the first of November that indicates that he'd gone too far."

"But now you're actually arguing _our_ case. That she snapped, and killed him to stop him pursuing her."

"Kill him, and break up the family and make the boys even unhappier than a messy divorce would have done? No. She saw herself as the problem, not him. She tried to take herself out of the equation, but she'd never have dreamed of removing him. Of course, the problem would have solved itself if Gibson's wife had waited just two days longer, because as we know, Melati's transfer was imminent at the time when he died. It would also have solved itself if Melati had told Svetlana that she was planning to leave, and why. But she obviously didn't, because it would have meant putting the cards on the table and making the man look pathetic, which she couldn't bring herself to do. So you might even say that by trying to save face, and keeping up appearances, and avoiding causing him, his wife and the kids embarrassment and hurt at all cost, she did kill him."

"But it wasn't her who injected him with that second dose of insulin."

"No."

"Then if she herself was innocent, she must have had her suspicions. Didn't she ever voice them in the interrogations?"

"No. That, too, was part of saving face. Look at the picture again, the later one. Look at the boys now. Would she even think of ruining their lives any further, by accusing their mother of murdering their father?"

"Did Gibson himself know who killed him, I wonder?"

"Oh, certainly. And that brings us to the final piece of the puzzle. The text message that he sent to Melati just before he died, and that had you all so mystified."

"Yeah, I remember. 'Mel, I need you.'"

"Which you probably read now as fitting in nicely with the fact that he was becoming a little too insistent in his declarations of love?"

"Yes, what else?"

Sherlock sighs. "You know, Lestrade, it's bad enough that you don't use your own brain at least once in a while, but trying to muddle up mine, too, is really not on."

"What?" I put down my pen and cross my arms. "When did I do that?"

"When you carelessly neglected to tell me, when you read the summary to me on Friday, that that message did _not_ run 'Mel, I need you'."

"Yes it did."

"No it didn't. It ran 'mel ineed u'."

"Same difference."

"Not at all." He jerks his head at the files again. "Volume three, page one hundred and seventy-two. His phone records from the last weeks of his life, including all the text messages he sent. On the bottom of page one hundred and eighty-four, you will find the second to last message he ever sent, at 9:08 p.m. on November the third, presumably from his office, to his wife: 'Won't make it home before 10. Kiss the boys goodnight for me.' Look at it. Not only a laudable sentiment, but proper spelling, capitalisation and punctuation as well. All the ones before that were the same."

"He was drunk when he tried to contact Melati."

"Only slightly, by his standards. And he often was, but according to the phone records, it never messed with his grammar. No. He was dying, and he knew it, so he wasn't going to waste time on linguistic niceties."

We look at each other in silence for a moment.

"So it wasn't an unsolicited declaration of love," I summarise then, "it was a cry for help. To the only person in the house that he still trusted. But it went unheard, because Melati was already asleep."

"And it might even have given you the name of his killer straight away, if he'd had the time to type that as well before the hypoglycaemic shock set in fully."

"Lucky Svetlana, then."

"Hmm. Not really."

"Why not?"

He tilts his head back and talks to the ceiling. "Because according to an article in the local online edition of the 'Komsomolskaya Pravda' that serves Western Siberia, her body was found floating in the river Ob in January 2001, with a high concentration of alcohol and an impressive range of benzodiazepines in her system."

I swallow. "What about the kids?"

"No idea."

For minutes on end, neither of us speaks.

"Thank you," I say then in a quiet voice, and close my notebook.

He turns his face back towards me. "Thank _you,_" he surprises me by replying, and smiles a little half-smile.

Another minute or so passes.

"Sherlock?"

"Mmh?"

"Did you sleep at all last night?"

He can't have. Not if he read all those two thousand pages, as he must have done to put it all together like that, and get to the right answer.

"Not much," he confesses, and yawns as if in confirmation.

"You know, I'm glad you worked this out for me, but I didn't mean for you to sit up all night and - "

"Oh, half the night at best," he mutters. "The other half I spent trying to get my head around what the point of the offside rule is." He yawns again. "But I'm afraid I drew a blank on that one."

"Well, even you can't triumph in every field, I suppose."

As long as you do in all the ones that really matter, I think but don't say.

He just gives me another drowsy smile in response, and his eyes close. He might as well admit that the spiders were wandering again last night, and he might as well tell me that he managed to keep them at bay and his head above water on his own this time, purely by digging in his heels and keeping his mind fixed on the work to be done. But he doesn't need to say it. I know it, and he knows that I know.

I sink my voice to a whisper. "Sherlock?"

No reply, except for the sound of deep, calm, steady breathing.

"I'm proud of you, lad."


	10. Chapter 10

He wakes only once, towards evening, gets rid of his lunch, and immediately afterwards demands dinner. We make do with more Pot Noodles, more takeaway - no soggy chips this time, though - and more tea; but even just practically, this can't go on forever. We can't keep pretending we're castaways on a desert island, while the rest of the world keeps turning without us.

"Listen, tomorrow morning - " I begin when he's about to get up from the table to crawl back into bed.

"Oh, I'll be fine tomorrow morning," he dismisses the issue. "Don't worry about me."

"I have to go back in to work."

"I know. It's alright. I've got things to do, too."

"What?"

"Yes."

"Are you joking?"

"Not in the least."

"You're in no state to go anywhere just yet. And when you are, you're coming straight to the Yard with me, to sort out this infernal business about whatever happened in Manchester."

"Oh, certainly. But there's someone else I need to see first."

"Why exactly?"

He grins humourlessly. "Because he's got my phone, and I want it back."

"Seriously."

"It's true."

"I don't care. I want to know where you're going."

Those cars outside my house weren't a figment of my imagination, after all.

"And I'm not going to tell you, so save your breath."

"You can't just - "

"What, disregard a warrant that _you've_ blithely ignored for three days and nights running now?" he quips, very efficiently taking the wind out of my sails. At least it saves me from telling him any outright lies about it.

"Look," he changes tack then, quietly but urgently. "I promise I'll be there. Give me til noon."

I raise my eyebrows.

"Alright, eleven. At eleven, I'll be at the Yard, and then you can do whatever you like with me. But not before."

When I don't reply, he leans forward across the table and fixes me with his pale eyes. "I'll never ask you to trust me again on anything, if you'll trust me on this." Another pause. "Please."

Well, that is certainly something new. The expression on his face is no longer one of stubborn determination, but a strange mixture of apprehension and resignation. I've never seen him look like that before, and it's disquieting.

But he's had a dozen chances by now to just clear out if he'd wanted to, and he's let them all pass. Whatever he's got planned now, he's serious about it, and for some reason, he doesn't want me to know what it is, but I can't bring myself to believe that he's just trying to trick me after all into letting him go and get another fix. He truly is over that now. And at any rate, I have no means of coercion left now, not after MacDee exploded the only one I had this morning.

"Are you sure that's wise?" I ask, still thinking of those cars, and his weakened state, and the big trouble that he confessed himself to be in on Friday, and that he's certainly not had a chance to resolve yet.

"Don't worry," he assures me, back in his former tone of confidence. "I'll be alright." He smiles wryly. "It's going to be massively unpleasant, but perfectly safe."

"Sure?"

He snorts, and it's impossible to tell whether with amusement or contempt. "Absolutely. I've done that before, too."

#

Monday morning, and my alarm going off at seven, as usual on a working day, seems like a sound out of a different world.

By twenty past, I'm in the kitchen making breakfast, and I can finally hear Sherlock stir as well. He pads into the bathroom and spends an inordinate amount of time in there. Then he opens the door and calls to me across the hall if he can borrow a shirt.

"What's wrong with the Sex Pistols?" I call back. "They've been through the wash at least twice."

"Not going to have my taste in music thrown in my teeth, too," I can hear him mutter, and I'm none the wiser.

A few minutes later, he's joined me at the table, showered and shaved and wearing one of my good white shirts. It's both too wide and too short for him, and it makes for an odd combination with his torn jeans, but I have to admit that it does look better than what he arrived in. So does he. The contrast is striking. He looks no worse now than any of us would, after a couple of days with too little sleep and too little to eat.

He wastes no time on making conversation, but tucks in with an appetite that is heartwarming to see. I let him finish his meal in peace, and resist the urge to tell him to go more slowly or he won't keep it down. He's got plans now, he's got a purpose, and that seems to give him a whole new level of energy. There is even a slight touch of colour on his cheeks today.

But when he's down to his tea, I take the bull by the horns. I still have something to say to him that I've put off until now, at first because I was sure I couldn't get through to him, and then because I didn't want to overburden the situation. But we're quickly running out of time, so it's now or never. Because otherwise, we'll be sitting here again, in a week or in a month or in a year, and that just isn't happening.

I am counting on seeing him again in a few hours, but this may still be the last quiet moment for a long time that just we two get to share. And there is, after all, also still a faint chance that whatever went technically wrong in Manchester last week has been fixed by now. In that case – meaning in some squalid visitor room in one of HM prisons - what I have to say to him will carry no conviction at all any longer.

"Right, before you go - "

"Oh, yes." He straightens up and grins at me mock-expectantly. "The sermon."

I can tell that I'm almost too late already. He hasn't just taken his time in the bathroom - he's been busy putting his armour back on, and I'd better hurry before the visor is down again, too.

"It's not a sermon."

"Call it what you like. Is it long?"

"No. Seven words, basically."

"Good. I'm all ears."

He actually is, but only because he's expecting it to be funny. Funny to him, of course.

I try not to let my annoyance show. "Right," I begin, crossing my arms over my chest. "You know what our motto is, at the Met?"

"Sure. 'Total Policing', or some such meaningless rubbish dreamed up by your PR department."

"That's the official one. I meant the real one."

"What's that, then?"

"It's 'We try. We fail. We carry on.'"

He leans back in his chair, his lip curling.

"Because that's what we do," I go on stubbornly. "And every single one of us, from the Commissioner to the humblest constable, would go bonkers within a year if we didn't subscribe to that with all our heart."

He takes another sip of his tea. "Yep. That's because you're incompetent, the lot of you."

"No. It's because we're human. And so, as it happens, are you."

For a moment, he looks as if he's seriously going to contest that statement. Then he thinks better of it, exhales audibly and snaps his mouth shut again. But at any rate, there is no trace of a grin left on his face now.

"I admit that until Friday, I wasn't entirely sure," I continue. "But since then, I've wiped your snot off your face and your vomit off my bathroom floor, so now I know you are. And that means you're never going to work with us again if you don't sign up as well, and mean it, and stand by it."

I watch his face as a whole range of emotions passes across it. Irritation. Resentment. A certain bitterness, too. He knows as well as I do that this is the sore spot. Nobody likes to have their weaknesses pointed out to them, him least of all.

"I mean it," I assure him. "We're tumbler toys, at the Met. You may call us idiots, but this is one thing, probably the only thing, that we can do better than you. Because who's going to do the bloody job tomorrow, if we let ourselves be blown right off course by the first head wind that comes our way? You take a leaf out of our book, and learn to stand up and take the full blast in your face, because that's how it's done."

Not ducking out like a coward, and slinking off to wonderland, pretending it hasn't happened.

I don't even say that bit aloud, but I'm half expecting him to jump up from his chair and shout at me, or maybe just walk out on me. But he does neither. His puts his mug down on the table, and his face twitches unpleasantly, but that's all the visible reaction that I can see.

I take courage from the lack of outright protest. "It will ruffle you, and sometimes it will even shake you to the core," I tell him, "but it won't uproot you."

He shrugs. "That would depend on the strength and the depth of one's roots, wouldn't it?"

"Well, let them grow."

"That will take time."

"We have time. Years and years, if you like."

He smiles then, a tentative, half-hopeful, half-incredulous smile, like a little boy who can't quite believe that the biggest present under the Christmas tree really is for him. It's gone again in an instant, but I've seen it, and I know I've got him.

"Come on," I urge him, trying to press home the advantage. "After me, now. Seven words."

He regards me in silence for a moment, then pushes his chair back and gets up. "I'll think about it," is all he says. "It may even sound good in Latin."

And he squares his shoulders and walks out of my kitchen without another word.

I let him. Because as I'm coming to know him, that answer is as good as the most solemn vow.

From the living room window overlooking the street, I watch him leave the house, cross the road and make straight for the car parked on the other side, confirming my worst suspicions. He opens one of the rear doors and gets in, without the slightest hesitation, but with a face like a thundercloud. The car drives away at moderate speed.

I try to take comfort from the fact that I've noted down its colour, make, number plate and everything else I could observe about it when I spotted it earlier this morning, before Sherlock was awake.

#

The trip into town is almost surreal. Alice must have felt like that, coming back out of the rabbit hole. The noise and bustle of the morning rush hour, those many faces and voices, all those people and their petty, trivial problems, seem a thousand miles away. It's like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

When I get to my office, rather later than usual, MacDee isn't in yet. I take a moment to confirm that he wasn't seeing things when he called me yesterday. He wasn't – or at least I'm seeing things now, too. There is not a trace left in the database of the entry that had us so worried for days. I'm about to pick up the phone and call the sergeant in Manchester to make absolutely sure that this is final, but at that moment, MacDee comes in. Or I would say he comes floating in, hovering a few inches above the ground, if such a thing were possible or even imaginable for a man of his weight and stature. But at any rate, he comes in and the sun rises. And he can't wait to tell me why.

The essence of it is, he did take his Cat to a nice place yesterday, a very nice place indeed, and they've got engaged.

Amazement, congratulations; thank God, there are wonderful set phrases for this kind of situation to take refuge in.

"Gosh, it feels unreal to just be back here today, like nothing has happened," MacDee says as he slumps down in his chair.

I couldn't agree more.

Then he swivels his chair round to face me, looking suddenly serious, and more than a little guilty. "Greg – "

I know what's coming now.

"It means I'm leaving, of course. End of the year, probably."

No surprise there. Aberdeen is where he belongs, after all. Cat runs her little business there; their old parents live there; lots of their friends, too. It was bound to happen, sooner or later.

"I know, MacDee. It's alright."

The girl deserves him, and the Grampian Police deserve him. It would be just selfish to spoil his joy.

"You'll be hard to replace," I tell him after a moment of silence, glad to have found something to say that's both kind and completely honest.

"Oh, now you're overdoing it," he replies, only half-mocking, in fact flushed with pleasure. "There's a boatload of decent people around here. Go on, who would you pick if you got to pick?"

"I don't know. I'd rather not think about it."

"Then I'll pick for you. I'd take Sally Donovan."

"I wouldn't have said she's your type," I ty to chaff him.

"She isn't _your_ type," he corrects me, smiling. "That's the point, you know. And another is that she's definitely the best of the bunch."

With that, I agree wholeheartedly.

"And it should work fine now, shouldn't it," MacDee continues, lowering his voice, "with, you know - "

With Sherlock gone, he means but doesn't say. I catch myself stealing a glance at the clock on the wall. Still only just after ten. This really can't go on.

Right on cue, the phone on my desk rings, and the number on the display says both 'urgent' and 'unpleasant'.

"Sorry, just a second." I pick it up. It's Helen, the Chief Superintendent's secretary.

"He'd like to see you," she informs me in a carefully neutral tone. "There's someone here with him, and they want to talk to you."

"What, right now?"

"Yes, right now."

I sigh, and hang up. I can almost feel MacDee's look of concern on my back as I depart.

#


	11. Chapter 11

The door between Helen's room and the Superintendent's office is ajar, so Helen and I resort to pantomime when I come in.

"Who is it?" I enact, jerking my head at the half-open door.

She shrugs.

"Any idea?" I mouth at her, raising my eyebrows questioningly.

"Home Office?" she suggests soundlessly, and my eyebrows go up even further.

There is no time for more, unless we want to be caught at this. I nod thank you to her, and walk over to knock on the door.

The two men in the room are in quiet conversation, but they fall silent and turn towards me when I enter.

I've never seen the Superintendent's visitor before, but Helen can't have been far off the mark. He wears a three piece suit that makes him look ten or even fifteen years older than he probably is, and it also makes the Super look as if he picked up his in a charity shop.

The stranger's face is a contradiction in itself, and that makes it hard to read. His prominent nose made him look formidable in profile, but straight on, it's roundish and smooth, giving the impression that it was actually made for laughter. But the arrow-straight lines of his thin eyebrows and his piercing eyes suggest that he hardly ever allows himself such a luxury.

"Thank you for coming so promptly, Detective Inspector," he greets me. There is a slight rasp to his voice, and also a slightly nasal tone. They make for an odd combination. The Superintendent never says a word.

"As you've heard, there is an urgent matter that I would like to discuss with you." He doesn't introduce himself, neither with a name nor with his rank or role. Instead, he turns to the Superintendent. "If you wouldn't mind - ?"

The unthinkable happens. The Super nods, meek, assiduous even, and walks out of his own office, closing the door softly behind him.

His visitor waves me to the chair in front of the desk and sits down in the Super's own. He puts the tips of his fingers together and regards me in silence for a moment.

If he's trying to make me uneasy, it works.

"I'm sure you're not wondering why I asked you to come here," he begins at last. He doesn't bother to say '_we_ asked you'. But then, what I've witnessed in the last two minutes makes it perfectly clear that the Superintendent will have no say in whatever this man has in mind for me.

"I'm sure you're about to tell me," I reply, trying to keep my voice as neutral and polite as his.

He smiles a cold, detached smile. "I think I'm about to surprise you."

"Feel free to surprise me, then."

A corner of his mouth twitches, as if he expected me to sing a lot smaller by now. But there is no point, I tell myself, in sitting here like a bird before a snake. At least not until I know for a fact that I'm on the menu.

"I'm here to congratulate you, Detective Inspector," he says, and admittedly, that _is_ a surprise. Underneath that urbane surface, he's certainly either secretly making fun of me, or trying to trick me into admitting to something that will mean trouble. Or both.

"Congratulate me on what?" I ask suspiciously.

"On doing justice to your reputation," he confuses me further.

"Which means - ?"

"That you have shown yourself lately to be a man to whom the strict letter of the law means little when he has a greater aim in view."

What an elegant way of saying that I'm found out, and done for. Now the only question that remains is why he – whoever exactly he is - thinks that it is a matter for congratulations.

"You mean I have a reputation of being a lawbreaker?" That comes out a tad more hostile than I meant it to. I _am_ getting nervous.

"A strange epithet for a police officer, Detective Inspector," he reproves me. "And an ugly word to describe any decent man."

"Thank you."

He smiles at my dry tone. There is another silence before he speaks up again.

"I'm also here to tell you that it is over."

"What is?"

I may not be giving the impression of great intelligence right now, being deliberately obtuse, but it's the best defence I can think of.

"Playing hide and seek." He's watching me for my reaction, and the thin-lipped smile returns. "Yes, I expected that you'd be more relieved than worried to hear that," he remarks with maddening accuracy. "Sherlock Holmes can be quite a handful, even sober. But no matter. You can pass that responsibility on to me now."

No more point now in denying it, or playing stupid. "What do you want with him?"

"The same as you."

I snort. "You want him to solve crimes for you?"

"I want to keep him alive, and safe."

It is at least half a minute before I remember to close my mouth again.

He gets up from his chair and wanders over to the window. For a moment, he looks out with his back to me as if to make up his mind about something, then faces me again. With the bright light coming in from behind him, I can hardly make out his expression.

"When I said that you have a reputation for occasionally putting what is right before what is correct," he says in a quiet, even voice, "you mustn't think that I was censuring you. I hesitate to call it a virtue, because that would raise to lofty heights what is in fact often no more than a simple necessity. But that means that it is not a vice, either. Not in my book, at any rate."

Now wouldn't I just love to know what sort of book exactly that is. I can tell that he's waiting for me to ask, and I decide that I'm not going to do him that favour.

"There are exactly four persons," he continues after a moment's pause, "who have ever seen both the best _and_ the worst of Sherlock Holmes. You, Detective Inspector, are one of those four. And even among those select few, you are the only one to whom he has granted that privilege of his own free will. I admit that this may sound like a questionable honour, but then my brother has always had his own unique ways of paying compliments."

He drops the word so lightly, so casually, that I almost miss it. Then my tired brain catches up, first with his actual words and then with their meaning, and that sends it reeling. Almighty God.

He walks back to the desk, deliberately turning his head so the light falls onto his face again.

"I know, it's not very obvious," he assures me in an understanding tone as he sits down again.

He's right. They really don't look alike. The hair colour is the same, and they're probably within an inch of each other's height, but I can see nothing of Sherlock's features in this man's face, nor hear anything of Sherlock's voice in his.

"We usually both perceive that as an advantage," the older Holmes elaborates. "One of the few things we agree on, actually. But I digress."

He squares his shoulders and raises his chin as if to conclude this particular part of the conversation.

Ironically, I do see it then. It's the same rise of the head, the kind that immediately puts them both on the height from which they like to communicate with us lesser mortals. They both radiate the same kind of confidence, and the same kind of arrogance. They share the same habit of command, and the same kind of condescending impatience whenever we others don't jump quickly enough to obey. I almost wonder now why I didn't see it the moment I entered the room. In fact, it could very well be that I've only seen the copy so far, and this is the original.

"My brother is a man of extraordinary abilities," he continues now, "but he has his faults. One of them is that he has not yet learned to approach certain matters and situations with the necessary degree of detachment. This, in turn, occasionally puts him in a state of mind that carries a certain risk, and that requires intervention. I'm talking about experiences such as the one he had, a fortnight ago, when you called him in to hunt down the man who murdered his three children."

I feel the blood rise into my face. "Are you saying that _I'm_ responsible for - "

He raises his hands in a gesture of appeasement. "No, no, not at all. I was merely attempting to describe the kind of circumstances that cause these… tailspins. I call them danger nights."

I frown.

"That expression is, of course, both unnecessarily lyrical as well as inaccurate," he concedes. "Those moments can occur in bright daylight as well as by night. And while the object of our concern would certainly approve of the touch of drama which the term conveys, he takes care not to advertise those incidents openly. Quite the contrary, in fact."

He takes a moment to look out of the window again before he continues.

"My brother strives for perfection, and he is certainly more justified to do so and also more successful at it than most other men of either your or my acquaintance. But it is one of the ironies of nature that the closer one approaches to perfection, the more intensely will the remaining deficiencies chafe."

I can't claim that I have any idea how that feels. But it must be true, because it confirms what I'd worked out before.

"In short, you mean he doesn't know how to handle failures," I sum up. After all, I told Sherlock as much myself, earlier this morning, and didn't hear him disagree.

"In short, yes."

I've never taken the time to wonder who instilled those sky-high, impossible-to-meet standards into Sherlock in the first place, but I do wonder now. Then I realise that the answer is probably sitting and smiling at me across the Super's desk. That smile. It makes me want to punch him, just to make it go away.

"And you think you're the one to teach him that?"

I don't really mean it to come out as an accusation, but it wipes the smile off his face alright.

"What makes you think I'm not?" the older Holmes replies in a rather sharp, almost harsh tone.

"You don't seem like the sort of person who does failures."

"On the contrary, Detective Inspector," he disagrees, still in that cold voice. "Much as I would wish that you were right, you are not. I have, over the past years, certainly failed several times already in one specific task, and a short time ago, I had good reason to believe that my latest failure of that kind would be a final and absolute one."

He looks, almost stares, at me across the desk with those unfathomable eyes of his, as if to challenge me to disbelief or protest. But I can find nothing wrong with loving your brother enough to go out of your mind with worry when he starts flirting with death. Small wonder this man doesn't get anywhere when he tries to lecture the same brother on the necessity of emotional detachment.

But for the first time since I entered this room, the idea occurs to me that it might make more sense to see him as an ally, rather than as an antagonist. And after all that I've put at risk lately, I could do with one.

"So," I say when he remains silent. "You say that you care when he gets in trouble. There's something of that sort right now that needs to be put straight." I hesitate. "But I suppose you know all about that already, too."

"I do." He smiles again. "And I'm glad to be able to tell you that it _has_ already been put straight."

"I mean that warrant," I say, to make absolutely sure we're not talking at cross purposes.

His smile intensifies. "What warrant?"

"So _you _made it disappear?"

"No, you did."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You did, you and your very astute young colleague. When you started wondering, and asking inconvenient questions. Oh, don't be alarmed." He must have seen me stiffen at the mention of MacDee. "You were right to, both of you."

"But that database - "

"Suffice it to say that the resources of the Home Office are at my disposition when the need arises."

"This was a court order."

"Yes. The same applies to the resources of the Ministry of Justice."

"So you can make a court rescind a warrant of arrest?"

"Oh, no." He looks almost comically scandalised at the notion. "That would be unconstitutional. At least in the case of a real warrant."

Jesus Christ. The things he's telling me, still in that calm, unruffled tone.

"You _faked _a court order? To get your own brother arrested?"

He gives me a look as if he can't quite see what might be wrong with that, but doesn't deny it.

"I merely tried to make sure that he was found as quickly as possible." At least he acknowledges that this requires some sort of explanation. "I concede that the execution wasn't as watertight as it should have been. But I was in a hurry. And I also admit that I didn't expect you and your sergeant to take the matter quite so much to heart, and to go to such trouble to try and prove that which must not, cannot be."

He's mocking me again, and it makes my hackles rise. "So all of that was a lie. Absolutely none of it was ever true."

"I'm afraid so, yes." He puts his hands together again, and I'd say he looks almost contrite, if he seemed capable of such a feeling at all. "I took care to make it plausible, of course, as well as effective. The charge had to be related to his current troubles, to direct your own drug squads and their Mancunian counterparts to the right places and circles. It had to be sufficiently serious to make sure that the matter received the attention it deserved. And I also took the liberty of adding a touch of colour, to make sure that once he was found, any leniency or lax handling that would open an opportunity for him to go astray again would be out of the question." I must look appalled, because now, his perpetual smile definitely takes on an apologetic quality. "A necessary precaution, I fear. He can be a slippery fish, I assure you."

I suppose most men would rather see their own brother in cuffs and in a cell than dead in the gutter with a needle in his arm. But to go to such lengths to make the one happen in order to prevent the other is just plain frightening. After all, if the brother in question is a grown man, then who except he himself has the right to decide which hell he prefers?

But at least I'm beginning to see what he meant when he said that breaking the law in a good cause wasn't a vice, in his book. If, in fact, he is what I think he is, that concept must be second nature to him. But I also know that men who regularly and professionally operate on that principle are likely to lose their grip and overstep the bounds at some point.

"Right," I say slowly. "So the moment you heard that your brother had decamped from that clinic, you enlisted us to help you catch him, and drag him back there?"

"Not quite. I do have a greater respect for the excellent work that you do with often very limited resources than you give me credit for. I didn't resort to that measure until I realised, early on Tuesday of last week, that it would very likely take us too long to find him by other means."

I think back to the fresh marks that I saw on Sherlock's arm when he arrived at my house, and to what got him into hospital in the first place. I can kind of see why his brother decided to pull out the stops. But still -

"He made an excellent job of avoiding us, at least at first," he continues. "We had no word of him at all until Wednesday morning. He'd been very careful to dodge cameras, but one in Manchester did catch him then. Of course, he was gone again by the time my people moved in. But it was a lead, and it turned out that we had been barely two steps behind him when he left that town, going south."

"You mean you chased him half-way across the country, in that state?" I can feel my anger flaring up again. What a strange, strange concept of brotherly love this man seems to subscribe to.

"I object to your choice of words, Detective Inspector," he protests, affronted. "I prefer to say that I kept myself aware of his movements. I was intrigued by his decision to leave Manchester and head back home. Of course, his only motivation might have been that he knew that only here in London would he have a chance to evade me for any length of time at all. But there were other possibilities, too. And as for his state, it was anything but obvious at the beginning. We lost him again on the way, too. He didn't resurface until Thursday afternoon, when he had made the decision to swap secrecy for speed. Another camera caught him on the platform at Birmingham New Street then, and it was only then, too, that I fully realised why he was in such a hurry to make headway. By then, the photographic evidence was quite eloquent."

I can still see Sherlock when he arrived at my house, shivering and sweating and twitching. He must have been a case for an ambulance already when he boarded that train. I can't believe that nobody noticed his state, and offered help, or at least alerted the staff on the train or at the station. And I can hardly believe that this man - the same man who professed himself to care deeply about his brother's wellbeing not ten minutes ago - was sitting somewhere in front of a screen watching it all, and still didn't intervene.

And here I was thinking of him as a possible ally.

He must be reading my thoughts. "I did intervene," he says. "Only in a less visible manner than you might have expected."

This takes a moment to sink in.

"You mean you _let _him carry on?" I ask then. "You let him get to London, and you let him go to ground at my place, even though you could have swooped down on him and hauled him off any minute then?"

He nods.

"Then what made you change your mind?"

"The same thing that made him change_ his _mind."

"You mean that once you knew that he was trying to quit, you let him try?"

"Yes."

"Then what was it that made _him _decide that he was going to quit?"

We've finally got to the one remaining mystery, the one question Sherlock never gave me an answer to, neither in so many words nor in any other way.

His brother opens his mouth, but even before he can speak, I've got it. Wednesday morning, in Manchester, when Sherlock had been careless enough to let himself be seen on camera, and when he'd evaded his brother's people only by inches, he must have known that he was on a countdown, and that they'd get him sooner or later. And that must have been when he decided that even if his brother would have his way in the end, he would at least get there on his own terms. Walking upright, not being dragged.

Did he really go through those five days of purgatory out of pure spite?

God help him. God help them both. And God help anyone who gets caught in the crossfire.

Oh, right. That's me.

"But - but how did you know that he was coming to stay with me, and that I would -"

Not a good idea, to say it out loud in your own Superintendent's office that you've been flouting your duty. Even if the Super himself is neither present nor likely to be listening at the door.

"I didn't _know_," the older Holmes corrects me, "but I was willing to trust my brother's judgement. Don't tell him I said that, though," he adds drily. "It will just go to his head."

"So _you, _too, were actually counting on me to help him through that nightmare, instead of turning him in?"

"I was certainly not going to stop you, once you had made that very commendable decision."

Well. Being tricked and used by a Holmes is anything but pleasant. Being tricked and used by two Holmeses at once is unpleasantness squared. But being tricked and used by two Holmeses _working against each other_ does things to your self-esteem that you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.

"Those cars outside my house -"

"Yes?"

"_Your _surveillance team."

"_Your_ support team, Detective Inspector. Just in case. And I hope you noticed that I withdrew them once the decisive battle was fought and won."

"And once I started asking inconvenient questions," I remind him, and he rewards me with an almost conspiratorial smile.

"That, too."

"But why me?" I feel a sudden genuine need to understand. "I mean, I know I give him work, and he enjoys it, but he still spends so much time calling me an idiot, why does he -"

Now his older brother positively chuckles, and that's a very strange sight and sound.

"Don't hide your light under a bushel, Detective Inspector," he intones sententiously. "Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognises genius. And vice versa."

Definitely a family thing, making odd compliments.

"And you certainly more than lived up to his and my expectations," he commends me. "I assure you that you have my sincere gratitude for rising to the occasion in such a selfless manner, and for never leaving his side until he was back on his feet."

"That's not true though," I admit guiltily. "I wish I'd managed that, but -"

"Oh, that," he waves it aside. "I was speaking figuratively. Please don't feel any qualms about that little excursion. Sherlock tells me that you seemed rather badly in need of a break at that point, so he made sure you took it."

He lets me digest that in silence. It's a good thing that there is virtually none of my self-esteem left by now, because this would probably have cost me the rest of it.

But maybe that is what makes me reckless enough to say what I say to him next.

"So, you said that he's your responsibility now?" I repeat his words from earlier on.

"With your permission."

That's just rhetoric, of course, but I'm going to take him at his word, and see how he likes it.

"Not sure you've got it."

Again, the smile is gone from his face in an instant, and it takes on the same hard expression that I saw before, brows drawn together, eyes narrowed. I know by now that this is a man whom you anger or disobey at your peril. But I'm also one hundred percent sure of what I'm going to tell him in a moment.

Of course, two weeks ago, I didn't know yet what a danger night was, so I didn't recognise it when it happened. And Sherlock's brother, who knows exactly what a danger night is, had no means of knowing that one of them _had_ come up. And that almost ended in something that doesn't bear thinking about. If we'd joined forces, if we'd been in touch back then -

But I can still see Sherlock's face, when I asked him on Friday night what had become of his brother - the brother that he, younger by seven years, never had a chance against unless he fought dirty. I can still hear Sherlock's voice echoing around my bathroom, too: _Why doesn't anyone understand? Anyone, ever? _And I remember how he left my house this very morning, to report himself back and clean again to that same someone who never understands, with about as much enthusiasm as a man on his way to the gallows.

"Look, I appreciate that you care about him," I tell him, "and that you wish him well. But you can't - "

What was I going to say? Treat him like a child? Then what was I doing all weekend, making him tea, and tucking him into bed, and holding his head when he was sick, and reading to him to keep him calm and entertained?

" - have him locked up?" his brother suggests with a rueful smile.

My mind takes a funny jump then, not back to the mystery of the faked warrant, but further back, to those eight days when Sherlock was in custody last year. Those eight days that he spent going through a factual enforced detox, while the court was making up its mind so very, very slowly whether to grant him bail or not.

I find myself wishing that his brother won't tell me that he was behind that, too, because I might just throttle him on the spot if he does. Then I realise that the only reason why he _doesn't _tell me is that I've already guessed it anyway.

I stare at him for a moment, until the urge to close my hands around something and press down hard subsides.

"No, you can't," I repeat then, impressed with myself at my calm tone. "Or when you do it next time, I won't help you. Because no matter how much you care, I'm not going to aid and abet you in making your brother's life a misery in the name of saving it."

There is a silence while he regards me quietly and steadily. As far as self-restraint goes, it looks like I've got nothing on him.

"We're on the same side, Mr Lestrade," he says then, and I note that it's the first time he addresses me by name rather than by rank. "We work towards the same end. It would be foolish not to cooperate."

That is certainly true. But if Sherlock finds out that we do, I'll have lost him, just like I would have lost him if I'd hauled him off straight away when he turned up at my house, four days ago.

And if I know one thing, it is that we didn't go through those four days and nights together in vain. I'm not going to throw that away, and his brother isn't going to take it away from us, either.

"On one condition," I reply.

"Which is?"

"That I don't just do what you tell me. Because I won't."

There is another pause. Then he takes out a wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket, produces a business card from it, and places it on the desk between us.

'Mycroft Holmes', it says. 'Consultant'. Nothing else. No address, no phone number, no e-mail.

I look up at him in surprise.

"Oh, of course, I forgot," he apologises instantly. "People don't usually contact me. I contact them. But in this case, I believe an exception is called for."

He borrows a pen from the Superintendent's desk and jots down a mobile phone number on the back of the card. Then he picks it up and offers it to me.

I take it.

#

We're both on our feet, and he's collecting his briefcase and a furled umbrella from the top of a filing cabinet by the door, when he turns back to me as if he's just remembered something else.

"By the way," he says, "I'm dining with the gentlemen from the Indonesian embassy on Thursday. What am I to tell the military attaché - can I congratulate him on his impending marriage, and put his mind at rest as far as his bride's welcome to our country is concerned? Or will Doctor Sudarmaputri still have any legal unpleasantness to fear when she comes to join her husband?"

I've had enough practice by now, so this time I manage to stop my jaw from dropping.

"Are you saying that _you_ planted those files on me for Sherlock to - "

"Oh, please, Detective Inspector," he talks over me in a slightly patronizing tone. "Your sense of timing is off. I may occasionally be able to make things happen, but even I can't predict the future."

He's right, of course. Those files landed on my desk after noon on Wednesday of last week, when Sherlock hadn't even got as far as Birmingham.

"But I saw a certain likelihood that you might find yourself glad of a means of distraction, sooner or later," Mycroft Holmes continues in a kinder voice, "so yes, I took the liberty of providing it, just in case. And I admit that there is a certain satisfaction, too, in being able to make at least a little contribution to a good cause. Particularly when one is usually relegated to a spectator's spot on the sidelines."

His lips twitch as if he's trying to force them into another of those fixed smiles, but this time, they don't quite obey. For a fraction of a second, I feel as if I'm getting a glimpse of what's really going on behind that cool façade, but then it's gone, and he's got himself in hand again.

"Besides, I saw an opportunity to tie up a loose end," he goes on. "For all his faults of character, Neil Gibson was a valuable man. I admit that it chafed a little that the manner of his death wasn't fully cleared up by your predecessors. I always feel that we owe our people that, at least."

Now my jaw does drop again, after all.

Mycroft Holmes sees it, tilts his head back and laughs outright in honest amusement. "Oh, of course. I should have known. Yes, there is always something that he misses, isn't there? I keep telling him so." He chuckles some more, as if to invite me to join in, but that's the last thing I feel like doing. He notices it, and sobers up quickly.

"Gibson was one of the first on the spot there, back in the early nineties," he explains. "He spoke the language excellently well, he knew everyone who mattered, and he had a firm grasp of our - and others' - petro-strategic interests in the region. So his death was in fact quite a loss. But of course," he reassures me, "we took care to back out of the investigation again very quickly and quietly, once we had established that his death could have had nothing to do with this particular side of his business activities. So I would never have held it against _you_ not to have seen it. In fact, it would have indicated rather sloppy work on our part if you had."

"So are you telling me that you knew all along how he really died, and just gave me the case so we could -"

" - have some fun with it?" he suggests sardonically. "No. Again, Detective Inspector, I have a greater respect for your limited time. As I told you, we backed out once we had eliminated the possibility that his death touched upon matters _we_ were interested in. We left all the rest to those that are constitutionally in charge of these things, as well as best equipped and most experienced to deal with them."

And who would have completely failed to do so, again, if it hadn't been for Sherlock Holmes.

"So," his brother reminds me gently after a moment, calling me back from - from somewhere else than this office, at any rate. "I take it that there is nothing left now that could stand in the way of the newly-weds' happiness?"

"No. I mean yes. It's all fine now. All well."

"Thank you." He smiles, and holds the door open for me.

#

When we emerge into the corridor together, he is there, in one of the chairs in the waiting area outside Helen's office, true to his word and true to his hour.

There is no reason anymore, of course, why he should have kept our appointment. But I'm glad that he did anyway. I didn't know how good it would be to see him back here, in his dark suit and good shoes and long coat, as if he's never been gone. Apart from the fading black eye, I can see only one other small reminder of the trouble of the past days, in the way he's huddled deeply into his coat to keep warm. And even that is gone the moment he gets to his feet to meet us, bolt upright and unsmiling.

I can feel Mycroft Holmes at my side stiffen and straighten up in response. I glance at him, and then at his younger brother again, and wonder how I could have been so naïve as to suppose that there was no more reason for Sherlock to turn up here as agreed. He's had to leave the field to his brother for the past hour, but he's not giving him one more minute than absolutely necessary. And he's already busy working it all out, and drawing his conclusions. His eyes dart over my face, then - he'll never cease to scare me - to the right pocket of my jacket, where I put Mycroft's card before we left the Super's office, and then across to his brother's face. His lip curls in a derisive sneer. Mycroft raises his chin and returns his brother's glare with a look of supreme unconcern. Not one word passes between them.

I know that this would be the moment to put it all straight again, to tell Sherlock what exactly I told his brother, to make it perfectly clear that it's not quite what it probably looks like to him - but somehow, I can't bring myself to break that intense silence.

And then it's too late. Mycroft Holmes exhales audibly, tightens his hold on the handle of his umbrella and just walks away, passing between us and down the long corridor without looking back. For a moment, I almost expect him to jauntily twirl his umbrella as he departs, but he doesn't. And from the way Sherlock stares him out of sight, as if to literally burn a hole into the back of that fine suit, he wouldn't have survived it if he did.

When Mycroft has disappeared round the corner, Sherlock turns back to me.

"You're theorising ahead of the data," I manage to get out then.

"Am I," is all he says in reply, and he doesn't even make it sound like a question.

Knowing that there is no point in pretending, I take his brother's card out of my pocket and hold the side with the phone number out to him.

"You are," I say. "Because just so you know, I'm not keen on using this. The best thing that can happen is that I'll never have to."

"Oh, that's a comfort," he retorts, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

"Well, I'm glad you agree."

He frowns at me. "When did I do that?"

And then he turns and starts walking away, too.

But just when I'm beginning to feel that familiar twinge in my chest again, harder and more painful now than ever before, he stops again and turns back, eyebrows raised expectantly.

"You coming?"

"What?"

A corner of his mouth goes up in a one-sided smile when he sees my surprise. "Don't you feel like you need a smoke?"

As usual, he's right.

"Actually, yes," I admit after a moment's pause, stupid with relief. "I'll show you where."

I'm still waiting for a chance to explain myself even now, by the way - eight years, a death and a resurrection later. But it doesn't matter so much anymore.

Still proud of the lad.

* * *

THE END

April 2015

* * *

**Endnotes: **

Endless thanks to my dear beta reader Cooklet, who quite possibly loves Papa Lestrade even more than I do, and who – as opposed to me – actually knows what he should sound like, too. Without our hours of preliminary discussion on the Science of Addiction and the wonderful character that is Detective Inspector Greg Lestrade, her language help and generally extremely helpful feedback, this story would not have been possible.

Thank you also to everyone else who provided inspiration for this, in matters great or small:

maryagrawatson put the idea for this story in my head when she said that she would like to read how Greg and Mycroft came to cooperate on keeping Sherlock safe.

Neil Gibson and his two ladies (one a fury, one a saint) belong to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of course; as do Alec Macdonald of Aberdeen, Athelney Jones, Toby the Sniffer Dog, and Mycroft's odd compliment.

The little boy under the Christmas tree and Mycroft's business card belong to silverblazehorse.

Jia, her little café and her unspeakably delicious carrot cake are real and deserve a greater monument than this.

And thank you, last but not least, to all followers/subscribers and reviewers for yet another wonderful journey. Your feedback means the world to me! :-)


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